The best sort order for a sale collection is a weighted blend of discount depth, available inventory, and recent sales velocity. Discount percentage draws shoppers in, inventory weighting keeps well-stocked deals on top, and velocity surfaces the markdowns people are actually buying. Sorting by discount alone usually promotes the leftovers nobody wanted at full price either.
Why Does Discount-Only Sorting Backfire?
The deepest markdowns in a sale collection are often the products that failed at full price: broken size runs, last season’s misses, the colors nobody chose. Rank purely by discount percentage and those products own your first row. Shoppers land on a sale page, see a wall of picked-over stock, and bounce. The discount got their attention, but the merchandise has to close the deal.
What Does a Balanced Sale Recipe Look Like?
- Discount depth as a meaningful weight, calculated from compare-at price versus current price, so real markdowns rank above token ones.
- Inventory quantity so products with healthy stock and full size availability rise, and thin remnants sink.
- Recent sales velocity so the deals shoppers are responding to this week get more exposure. See sales velocity metrics for choosing a window.
The exact weights depend on your goal. Clearing stock? Lean harder on discount and inventory. Maximizing sale revenue? Lean on velocity.
How Do You Handle Fast Sell-Outs?
Sale collections sell out faster than any other page on your store, which means the sort order decays faster too. Push sold-out products down automatically, and use an inventory buffer to treat nearly-gone items as gone before shoppers hit a dead end. Then re-sort frequently. During a heavy promotion, a sort order from this morning can already be wrong by the afternoon.
Dynasort handles all of this automatically. Install it from the Shopify App Store or see how it works.