A merchandising recipe is a reusable sorting strategy that ranks products in a collection using a weighted blend of signals, for example 50 percent sales velocity, 30 percent inventory depth, and 20 percent newness. Instead of dragging products around or settling for one built-in sort order, you define the logic once, apply it to many collections, and let it re-sort automatically as the data changes.
What Goes Into a Recipe?
A recipe is a list of signals plus the weight each one carries. Useful ingredients include sales velocity, sell-through rate, total sales, inventory quantity, days of inventory, margin, price, product age, review data, discount depth, and metafield values. The weights encode your priorities. A new arrivals recipe leans on newness with a dash of early sales. A clearance recipe leans on stock depth and discount. A core category recipe balances proven sellers against availability.
Why Use Recipes Instead of One Sort Order?
Shopify’s built-in sort orders are single-signal: best selling, price, newest, alphabetical. Real merchandising goals almost always involve trade-offs between signals, sell what is selling, but do not bury new launches, and do not showcase products you cannot fulfill. A weighted recipe expresses that trade-off explicitly, which a single column sort never can.
Recipes also scale. Build one strategy and assign it to ten or a hundred collections, and every one of them stays current without anyone touching it. When you change the recipe, every assigned collection updates. That makes the recipe a living document of your merchandising intent: anyone on the team can read the weights and know exactly why the collection looks the way it does.
How Do You Know a Recipe Works?
Measure it. Watch collection conversion rate before and after, and where possible test one recipe against another. Treat weights as hypotheses you refine, not settings you set once and forget.
Recipes are the core of Dynasort. Install it from the Shopify App Store or see how it works.