Document your merchandising strategy as a set of rules, not a slide deck. For each collection type, write down the goal, the signals that should drive ranking (and their relative weight), the exceptions (pinned heroes, excluded products), and how success is measured. If you use a sorting tool, the recipes themselves become the documentation: they state the intent and they execute it.
What belongs in the document?
Keep it to one page per collection type. For each, capture:
- Goal: what this collection is for (discovery, clearance, campaign support).
- Ranking signals and weights: for example, sales velocity heavily, margin moderately, newness lightly.
- Exceptions: what gets pinned, what gets excluded, and how sold-out items are handled.
- Success metric: usually collection conversion rate, plus position effectiveness as a sanity check.
- Review cadence: when the weights get revisited, and by whom.
Why do recipes beat written documents?
A written strategy drifts. The person who sorted the collection leaves, the doc goes stale, and six months later nobody knows why the grid looks the way it does. A sorting recipe cannot drift from practice because it is the practice: the weights you wrote down are the weights being applied, on a schedule, to every collection that uses the recipe. New team members read the recipe and see the intent. Auditing your strategy becomes reading configuration instead of interviewing whoever sorted things last.
If you formalize nothing else, name your recipes descriptively (“Velocity plus margin, sale collections”) and record one sentence of intent for each. That small habit preserves more institutional knowledge than most strategy decks ever do.
Dynasort turns strategy into living configuration. Install it from the Shopify App Store or see how it works.