Build a custom sorting strategy

Siftori’s strategy builder lets you decide exactly how a collection sorts: pick a sort order with tiebreaks, and optionally pull some products, like new arrivals or sale items, to the top with sections of their own. Open it with New strategy on Home (choose Start from scratch, or Use a template to begin from a working example), or open an existing strategy from the Home list.

New to strategies? Sorting strategies and templates covers what a strategy is and the ready-made ones you can start from.

Nothing changes in your store while you edit. A new strategy is created only when you press Save, and edits to an existing strategy take effect at the next sort. The In plain words section at the bottom restates the whole strategy as you edit, so you can check it reads back as what you meant.

Picking the sort order

A strategy with no sections of its own is one sort order applied to the whole collection. That sort lives in the last line of the Sorting sections section, titled All products until you add a section of your own. Every sort option is a complete phrase, so there is no separate ascending or descending toggle:

Sorts on	Options
Price	Lowest price first / Highest price first
Date added to Shopify	Newest first / Oldest first
Inventory	Least stock first / Most stock first
Discount	Deepest discount first / Smallest discount first
Title	Title A–Z / Title Z–A
Nothing	Keep current order
A daily shuffle	Random (fresh shuffle daily)

Keep current order leaves products where they are, which is useful as a final tiebreak. Random reshuffles once per day, not on every sort, so an hourly schedule doesn’t churn your storefront. A product’s discount is the percentage off its compare-at price, and products not on sale count as 0.

Products with no value for the sort you picked go last, whichever direction you sorted in. Products that tie all the way down keep a steady order, so repeating a sort when nothing has changed does not shuffle it.

Tiebreaks

Press + Add tiebreak to decide what happens when the main sort can’t separate two products. Each “If tied,” row only applies to products the rows above it left tied, and you can drag the rows to reorder them. For example: Deepest discount first, if tied Lowest price first, if tied Newest first.

Ranges

For sorts on a number (price, inventory, discount), + Group into ranges sorts by range instead of exact value. Lowest price first in ranges of 20 treats 0 to 19.99 as one range, 20 to 39.99 as the next, and so on. Products in the same range count as tied, so the next tiebreak decides their order. Ranges of 20 on price with a deepest-discount tiebreak, for example, turn a sale collection into price ranges with the best deal leading each one.

Pulling some products to the top: sections

Press + Add a section to treat some products differently from the rest. The new section opens straight away so you can say which products it covers. A section has three parts:

• Include: which products can join the section. Pick All products, or products matching conditions you write (see below).
• Sort them by: the sort order for the section’s products, with the same tiebreak and range controls as above.
• An optional cap: check Limit how many products this section shows to let in only the first few matching products, as many as you set. The rest fall through to the next section or to the sort order at the end, as if they hadn’t matched.

On the page, each section is a single line that reads as the section it holds, written out in plain words, so you can tell your sections apart at a glance and see the whole strategy at once. A section you have just added reads Pick the products this section covers until you fill in a condition. Press a line to open it again, and Done to close it. Done is the only way out that keeps what you changed in the panel: closing it any other way leaves the section as it was. Nothing is saved until you press Save on the bar at the top.

With more than one section, products are matched against the sections top to bottom and the first match wins, so put the more specific section higher. Drag sections to reorder them.

Products that match no section follow the sort order in the last line, Everything else, which reads “Products left over from the sections above are sorted by:”.

Including all products

Pick All products under Include to fill a section from the whole collection instead of by conditions. With a limit, it takes at most the number you set, and everything else flows on to the sections below. Stacking all-products sections fills the top of a collection a few products at a time. A section of 4 sorted by Random (fresh shuffle daily) puts a rotating showcase at the top, and an all-products section of 5 sorted by Lowest price first beneath it holds the 5 cheapest products the showcase didn’t take.

Without a limit, an all-products section takes every product that reaches it, so put it last.

Writing conditions

A condition compares one product field against a value you type:

Field	Compares
Tag	any of the product’s tags
Product type	the product’s type
Vendor	the product’s vendor
Title	the product’s title
Price	the product’s price (its lowest variant price)
Discount %	the percentage off the compare-at price, 0 when not on sale
Inventory	total stock across tracked variants
Days since added	days since the product was created in Shopify

Inventory counts only variants with Track quantity on. Untracked and backorder products count as zero, so they lead on Least stock first. Keep them out with a second condition, Inventory greater than 0.

Text fields compare with is, is not, contains, and doesn’t contain. Number fields compare with is, is not, greater than, less than, and their or-equal variants. So “new arrivals” is Days since added less than 30, and “on sale” is Discount % greater than 0.

A section can hold several conditions, and the Include dropdown says how they combine: products that match all of them, or products that match any of them. To mix and with or, use two sections. Products where (type is Mug or type is Bowl) and price is less than 40, say, becomes a “Mugs under 40” section above a “Bowls under 40” section.

Saving

Save with the bar at the top of the page. If a section is incomplete or invalid, the message appears on the section’s line, and on the exact field it concerns when you open that section. Usually it is an empty condition value, limit, or range size. Fix it and save again.

Then open a collection the strategy holds and press Apply Sort to see the resulting order before anything goes live.