Shopify orders storefront search results by its own relevance score, and native controls over that order are limited. The free Search & Discovery app lets you boost individual products for specific queries by hand. To order every search by sales, inventory, margin, or conversion data, you need a re-ranking app that scores results with rules you define.
What Can You Change Natively?
Shoppers can switch the sort themselves on most themes, usually to price. On the merchant side, Shopify’s Search & Discovery app lets you pick boosted products per search term. That works for a handful of high-traffic queries, but it is manual curation: every boost is a product you chose for a query you predicted, and it goes stale as your catalog moves.
How Re-Ranking Works
Search re-ranking splits the job in two. Shopify keeps deciding which products match a query, including typo tolerance and synonyms, so shoppers never lose results. The re-ranking layer then orders those matches by a rule you set. Useful orderings include:
- Sales first, so proven products lead every query instead of whatever relevance happens to surface.
- In-stock first, so sold-out items stop absorbing the top positions, or disappear from results entirely.
- Blended scores that weight sales, conversion rate, margin, and stock together, the same way you would merchandise a collection page.
Because the rule applies to every query automatically, there is nothing to predict and nothing to maintain per search term. Change the rule and every result page follows.
Dynasort re-ranks every Shopify search with rules you control. Install it from the Shopify App Store or see how Dynasort search re-ranking works.