Merchandise a gift guide by combining editorial curation with automated ordering. Hand-pick which products belong in the guide, pin a few anchor gifts to the top, then let performance data (sales velocity, clicks, stock) order everything else. Add price banding so shoppers hunting for a gift under a budget can find options fast, because gift buyers shop by price ceiling more than by category.
Why curation alone is not enough
A gift guide is an editorial product: someone chose these items for a reason, and that point of view is the value. But a hand-sorted guide goes stale the same way any manual collection does. The picks from week one are not the picks shoppers are actually buying in week four, and gift season moves quickly. Keep the curation (membership and a few pinned heroes) and hand the ordering to a recipe. Pinned products stay put while the recipe sorts around them, so the guide stays opinionated and current at the same time.
How should you handle price banding?
Gift shoppers think in budgets: under 25, under 50, under 100. You can build separate collections per band, or you can encode the band on each product with a metafield and use it as a sorting input. Numeric metafield range values are built for exactly this, letting you group products into tiers instead of sorting by raw price, which tends to bury your best gifts behind your cheapest ones.
What about stock during gift season?
Nothing kills a gift guide like recommending something that cannot ship in time. Make the sort inventory aware: push sold-out items down and demote products that are nearly gone before they strand a shopper at checkout. A guide that quietly rotates out dying stock keeps its credibility through the whole season.
This is one recipe in Dynasort: pins for curation, weighted signals for the rest. Install it from the Shopify App Store or see how it works.