When you walk into a well-merchandised retail store, there’s a reason certain products are at eye level, some get an endcap, seasonal items move to the front, and things that are no longer available don’t stay mixed in with everything else. Retailers spend a lot of time thinking about product placement because where something appears can influence whether a shopper notices it, considers it, and ultimately buys it.
Your eCommerce store should be treated the same way.
A lot of store owners put a tremendous amount of effort into homepage banners, product photography, SEO, paid ads, email campaigns, and checkout optimization, but then leave category and collection pages largely alone. Products are added, inventory changes, items sell out, new products arrive, and over time those pages can become a mix of whatever happens to be there rather than a deliberately merchandised shopping experience.
That matters more than it may seem.
The category or collection page isn’t just a list of products. It’s one of the main places where shoppers decide what they’re going to look at next.
That’s why product order deserves more attention than simply accepting whatever default sort your eCommerce platform gives you.
Out-of-Stock Products Can Quickly Clutter a Page
One of the most common merchandising problems is allowing out-of-stock products to remain scattered throughout a category or collection.
Let’s say a shopper lands on a page with 24 products. A few of the first products are sold out, there are several more unavailable items halfway down the page, and another couple near the bottom. The page technically looks full, but a large portion of what the shopper is seeing isn’t actually available to purchase.
From a merchandising standpoint, that’s wasted space.
It also creates unnecessary dead ends. A shopper sees something interesting, clicks through, and discovers they can’t buy it. They go back, click another product, and maybe hit the same problem again. The more often that happens, the more friction you’re adding to what should be a pretty simple process of browsing and choosing a product.
When shoppers encounter large numbers of out-of-stock products, they typically leave and look elsewhere. That doesn’t mean every out-of-stock item on a category page automatically costs you a sale, but repeatedly putting unavailable merchandise in front of shoppers is not helping the buying process.
This is especially important on high-traffic category pages where the first few rows receive the most attention. If prime positions are being occupied by products shoppers can’t buy, you’re pushing available merchandise farther down the page for no good reason.
There are plenty of good reasons to keep an unavailable product visible.
Maybe it’s coming back into stock shortly, customers search for that product by name, or the page receives organic search traffic. You may want shoppers to sign up for a back-in-stock notification, compare it with another product, or simply see the full assortment your store normally carries.
The better approach in many cases isn’t to hide the product. It’s to change where it appears.
Keeping out-of-stock items farther down the category or collection page allows those products to remain discoverable without giving them the same prominence as merchandise that can actually be purchased today. It preserves the product page, the SEO value, and the opportunity for back-in-stock notifications while putting available products in the positions shoppers are most likely to notice first.
That’s a much better compromise than having sold-out products randomly mixed throughout the page.
Product Order Should Be Intentional
There’s no perfect way to sort every category. In some cases, best sellers should lead the page because they’ve already proven to be popular. For another category, new arrivals might deserve the top positions. You may want to prioritize products with excess inventory, promote higher-margin items, feature seasonal merchandise, or manually curate a particular assortment for a promotion.
What matters is that the order is intentional.
A shopper looking at the first row of products shouldn’t be seeing those items simply because they were created first in the catalog or because nobody has touched the category sort in six months. Those positions are valuable real estate, and they should be treated that way.
Even something as simple as sorting by best selling can create a more useful shopping experience than leaving products in an arbitrary order. It gives shoppers an immediate look at what other customers are buying and tends to surface products that are already performing well.
Of course, that doesn’t mean every store should sort every category by best seller. Good merchandising involves balancing popularity with variety, inventory, new merchandise, promotional priorities, and the needs of the individual category.
The important part is that someone, or something, is actively managing that order.
Merchandising is a Never Ending Task
Even if you spend an afternoon perfectly arranging your category pages, you’re not done.
Inventory changes constantly. Products sell out and come back in stock. New items are added. Best sellers change. Promotions begin and end. Seasonal products become important for a few weeks and then need to move out of the way.
The sort order that looked perfect today might look very different a month from now.
That’s where manual merchandising becomes a problem, especially for stores with large catalogs. Nobody wants to spend time every morning checking dozens or hundreds of categories to see which products sold out overnight, which items need to move up, and which layouts need to be changed for an upcoming promotion.
That work is important, but it’s also repetitive and very easy to forget.
Magic Sorter to the Rescue!
Our Magic Sorter app for BigCommerce and Shopify was designed to take a lot of that repetitive merchandising work off your plate.
You can manually drag and drop products into the exact order you want, or automatically sort products based on criteria such as Best Selling, Newest, Price, Inventory, and other product properties. You can also have Magic Sorter automatically re-run those sorts each day so the category or collection continues to adjust as your catalog changes.
With the new Magic Sorter Premium plan, we’ve also added a feature specifically aimed at one of the biggest merchandising headaches we just talked about: out-of-stock products.
Premium can automatically move unavailable products to the bottom of your categories or collections across the store. The important part is that when inventory returns, Magic Sorter remembers where the product belonged and automatically puts it back in its original position.
So if a popular product is sitting near the top of a category and sells out, it can move out of the way instead of occupying prime space while it’s unavailable. When the product comes back in stock, it returns to the position you had already chosen for it.
That means you don’t have to keep track of which products moved, where they used to be, or which categories need to be cleaned up after inventory changes.
Getting someone to your store is often the expensive part. You may have paid for the click through Google Ads, spent time building an email campaign, worked for months to rank a category page in search, or brought the shopper in through social media.
Once they arrive, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find something they can actually buy.
If the first products they encounter are sold out, poorly arranged, left over from an old promotion, or simply not the products you most want shoppers to see, you’re wasting some of the opportunity you worked to create.
That’s the same basic principle retailers have followed in physical stores for decades.
The “shelf” may be different, but the idea isn’t.
Learn more about Magic Sorter for BigCommerce or Magic Sorter for Shopify and see how automated product sorting can help keep your categories and collections properly merchandised.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.