Sorting strategies and templates

A sorting strategy decides the order of products in a Shopify collection. In Siftori you create one from a template or build one from scratch, and every strategy is yours to edit: rename it, change its rules, duplicate it, assign it to collections, or delete it.

The templates

A template is a ready-made strategy you copy, so common orderings don’t have to be built by hand. Your copy is a normal strategy that you can rename, edit, assign, and delete, and it never changes when Siftori updates the template catalog later.

• New arrivals first: newest products at the top, so the collection always looks fresh. Use this when new stock is what brings customers back.
• Lowest price first: cheapest products at the top, an easy first purchase for price-conscious shoppers. Use this for outlet and budget collections.
• Low stock first: products with 5 or fewer left at the top, scarcest first and newest first on ties. The rest follows, newest first. Almost-gone products nudge shoppers to buy before they miss out, and limited runs sell through instead of lingering. The threshold is yours to edit after picking the template.
• On sale first: discounted products at the top, deepest discount first. The rest follows, newest first. Your strongest deals do the selling in a sale or promo collection.
• Sale first, then new arrivals: two groups stacked. Sale items go on top, deepest discount first. Products added in the last 30 days follow, newest first. Everything else keeps its current order below. Use this to run a promotion without burying what just arrived.
• Clearance last: full-price products first, newest at the top. Discounted products sink to the bottom, deepest discount last. The prime spots keep selling at full price, and sale items stop taking over a regular collection.
• Featured tag on top: products tagged “featured” at the top, newest first among them. Everything else follows, newest first. Tag your bestsellers in Shopify, or point the segment at a tag you already use. Either way you get a hand-picked spotlight you control from your product tags.
• Daily shuffle: a new order every day it sorts. Products stuck at the bottom get their turn at the top, so more of your catalog gets seen.

How a strategy sorts

Some templates simply sort the whole collection one way, like New arrivals first. Others pull a group of products to the top first. In Low stock first, products with 5 or fewer left go on top, scarcest first. Everything else follows below, newest first.

That’s the whole model: a strategy can have one or more groups (the app calls them segments), each with a condition and its own sort order. Sale first, then new arrivals stacks two of them. A product joins the first group it matches, and whatever matches no group follows the final sort order at the end.

Open any strategy to see its rules restated in plain language under In plain words.

“Newest” is based on when the product was created in Shopify. Sold-out handling and pins sit on top of every strategy; see Sold-out handling and Pinned products.

Creating a strategy

Press New strategy in the Sorting strategies section, then choose Use a template or Start from scratch. Either way the strategy editor opens with an unsaved draft: nothing is created until you press Save, and Discard (or leaving the page) cancels the whole thing. Once saved, the strategy shows up in the strategy dropdowns, on collections and as the store default.

Editing a strategy

Every strategy opens in the strategy editor, where you can rename it (Strategy name) and change every rule: the sort order, tiebreaks, segments and their conditions. See Build a custom strategy for everything the editor can do.

Two things worth knowing before you edit:

• If the strategy is in use, the editor says so: “Used by 3 collections”, or that it is your store default. Saving changes how all of them sort.
• Edits take effect at the next sort, scheduled or manual, not the moment you save.

Duplicating and deleting

• Duplicate: open the strategy and press Duplicate to get an identical copy you can experiment on. The original, and every collection using it, stays untouched until you assign the copy somewhere.
• Delete: open the strategy and choose Delete Strategy. If the strategy is in use, the confirmation spells out what changes: collections using it directly revert to your store default sorting, and if it is the store default, collections that follow the default keep their current order until you choose a new one.

Where a strategy applies

• Store default: set Default sorting strategy under Sorting defaults. Collections follow it unless they override it.
• Per collection: set Strategy in the collection’s Sorting Strategy section. A collection can follow the store default, use a specific strategy, or use No strategy.
• No strategy means Siftori keeps the collection’s current order. Pins and sold-out handling still apply. You can pick it as the store default as well.