Rules can change which products appear in which order in any product listing

You can define a strategy for each widget of each of your WPO (Widget & Page Optimizer) and this strategy will be responsible to define dynamically what products should appear in which position.

However, sometimes, you want to force one or several products to appear on top, in a specific position, or to be removed from the results. While you should only do that for special cases and use dynamical strategies and logic for most situations, it happens you need to have a final control on the results. This is what Rules are for!

To create a rule, you must first know and select on what Widget you want this rule to apply (a rule is connected to one widget always), so if you do not know what widget you want to work on, go the the main WPO view to retrieve your widgets strategy and identify the right one.

Then, Rules always promote or remove one specific product or a segment of products. This is defined by a filter on a product attribute (e.g.: the product id) and values.

It is possible to connect your Rules with a context to make them Conditional so they only apply in specific situations (e.g. : in a specific category or when people make a specific search query).

To force one or several products to appear first in a product list

To bring a product on top, you need to create first your Rule and connect it to the right widget (see topic 1 for support on this)

Bringing a product on top is defined by the right part of the edition or the Rule: the Effect. Indicate what product you want to put on top (for example: field: "id" and values with the id of the product, then select the effect "rank" and put the ranking position to 1. If your product was already in the result list (but not on top) that's enough, but if your product was not there, you must also select the check box "force include" to include it in the results. Otherwise, it will be pushed on top only if it was already part of the results and not otherwise.

Alternatively, you can simply include or exclude the product (instead of ranking it), Include just make sure it is part of the results, but doesn't affect its position and exclude removes it from the product results. Finally you can use the option "boost" if you want to promote it with a specific weight (see the weighting of your Scorers in your WPO Strategy for more details about boost weights and the scoring formula).

Make your rule only active in some cases (e.g.: for a category or a search query)

If you want your rule not to apply all the time in your widget, but only in specific situation or for specific people, you will need to set a context and make your Rule conditional.

After defining your Rule for the right widget (see help in topic 1 and 2), you can define a Context on the left part of the Rule Edition Dialog Box.

You can create your Context condition on many different aspects, such as : a search query (so it only happens on specific search pages), a filter (so it only happens on a specific category page), a context item (so it only happens for product recommendations on the product detail page on specific product pages or basket recommendations when specific products are already in the basket) or as a specific variant of an A/B test by defining a test variant.