A product boost is a temporary lift applied to a product’s ranking in a collection. It adds extra weight to that product so it climbs higher than the sorting logic alone would place it, without locking it to a fixed slot. Boosts differ from pins: a pin nails a product to an exact position, while a boost tilts the playing field and lets everything else keep moving.
When Should You Boost Instead of Pin?
Boost when you want influence without total control. Typical cases: a product launch that has no sales history yet, a marketing campaign pointing at one hero item, a seasonal product whose moment has arrived, or stock you need to move this month. In each case you want the product more visible now, but you also want it to fall back naturally once the moment passes or the data catches up.
Pin when the position itself is the point, for example a flagship product that anchors the top left of a collection as a brand statement. Pins are powerful in small doses, but every pinned slot is a slot your sorting can no longer optimize, so a wall of pins quietly turns automation back into manual sorting.
How Do Boosts Work With a Sorting Recipe?
A boost stacks on top of the recipe score rather than replacing it. The product still earns its baseline rank from the usual signals (sales velocity, inventory, newness, margin), and the boost adds a push. That means safeguards keep working: if the boosted product sells out, out-of-stock handling can still demote it, which a hard pin would prevent. The result reads as merchandising, not as a frozen exception. The product boost attribute explains the mechanics in Dynasort.
A good rule of thumb: pins for permanent statements, boosts for moments, weights for everything else.
Boosts are built into Dynasort. Install it from the Shopify App Store or see how it works.