Frequently asked questions

Smart Merchandiser helps eCommerce businesses save time, boost productivity, and increase sales by automating inventory management, optimizing product placement, and providing real-time insights. 

Our platform delivers powerful, AI-driven capabilities that help your team drive higher customer engagement, increase conversions, and streamline workflows.

Absolutely! You can book a 30-minute demo with our team or start a 30-day free trial to experience the Smart Merchandiser difference yourself.

Smart Merchandiser offers scalable, flexible pricing plans designed to meet the needs of eCommerce businesses of all shapes and sizes. 

Our plans include:

• Monthly or yearly subscription options (with the yearly plans being discounted)
• Special enterprise solutions to suit the needs of larger eCommerce organizations
• Satisfaction guarantee — so you see results fast or get support to optimize your setup

For specific pricing details and custom quotes, get in touch with our sales team.

Leading brands like Timberland, Vans, The North Face, and JanSport rely on Smart Merchandiser to optimize their digital storefronts, boost productivity, and increase sales. 

Some of these brands have recorded a 20% increase in conversions and a 70% increase in the productivity of their merchandising teams since starting to use our AI-powered platform.

Smart Merchandiser uses AI and machine learning to automate tedious tasks, recommend product placement, and highlight trending items — allowing your team to focus on strategy instead of manual, error-prone work. 

You can see the full list of features here.

By leveraging AI-driven product sorting, performance overlays, and real-time analytics, Smart Merchandiser ensures high-performing products get optimal visibility, leading up to 20% higher conversions. 

You can learn more about our platform’s capabilities here.

From drag-and-drop visual merchandising to bulk editing, automated product sequencing, and smart inventory management, Smart Merchandiser can save up to 7 hours of manual work every day. That’s over 150 hours saved each month and over 1,800 hours each year! 

Explore all time-saving features here.

Smart Merchandiser offers real-time conversion tracking, sales trends, customer behavior insights, inventory visibility, and product reviews — all in one place, directly within your dashboard, so you never have to switch between multiple platforms and spreadsheets again.

See what else can our platform do for your team.

Yes! Smart Merchandiser provides real-time inventory tracking, automated alerts, and AI-driven product substitutions to keep stock issues from affecting your sales in the future. 

Learn more about these features here.

With bulk publish/unpublish, smart sorting, and AI-powered recommendations (among other features), Smart Merchandiser helps you launch and manage promotions in minutes instead of days. 

Discover more smart features here.

Smart Merchandiser integrates seamlessly with HCL Commerce, Adobe Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and SAP Commerce Cloud, with additional custom integrations available upon request.

We support Google Analytics and Coremetrics, but we can integrate with most analytics platforms. 

Smart Merchandiser also integrates with ratings and reviews platforms like Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews — among others — to ensure current and accurate customer feedback influences your merchandising decisions.

Absolutely. Inventory data is automatically updated and visible at the SKU level, helping your eCommerce team make informed restocking and promotional decisions. 

See what else our platform can help your team achieve.

Yes! With PLP color management and PLP leading image management, you can control which colors and images customers see first, ensuring a more engaging and conversion-optimized shopping experience. 

See how these features work here.

Of course! Smart Merchandiser is built to support enterprise eCommerce businesses, allowing your digital merchandising team to manage multiple storefronts and brands from an easy-to-use, centralized platform.

Your team can master Smart Merchandiser in just half a day, thanks to its intuitive, drag-and-drop interface and intuitive visual merchandising capabilities. 

Discover what else is special about our platform.

Implementation of our AI-powered platform is fast. Most brands go live within days, instead of months. And most brands start seeing their ROI within the first 30 days! 

Our team ensures a seamless implementation with minimal disruption to your current workflows.

Business Manager handles a subset of the catalog data Smart Merchandiser handles, and the merchandiser’s work is spread across screens — inventory at the product, color, or size level means navigating multiple views, and analytics lives somewhere else again. Smart Merchandiser puts inventory, SKU coverage, and website analytics on the product tile itself, so decisions happen while sequencing the grid.
Smart Merchandiser also does things Business Manager doesn’t:

• Smart Sort — reposition only qualifying products, leaving others in place
• Product Clipboard — bulk add, remove, replace, or publish by product ID
• Linked Categories — sync positions and assortments across catalogs
• Color Management — sequence and publish swatches in one modal
• Leading Color and Leading Image — a different color or image per category

Einstein is an algorithmic sorting and recommendation engine; Smart Merchandiser combines algorithmic and merchant-controlled sorting. They work together within the same category: a merchandiser sets category positions for the products they want to control manually and leaves position blank for the rest, with the sorting rule configured so Einstein handles the fallback.

Every storefront renders products differently, so Smart Merchandiser presents a single standard grid view rather than replicating each merchant’s layout. The preview reflects sequence (where the category sorting rule uses category position), product names, product colors, and pricing data. Presentation details controlled by your storefront — badges, promotional messaging, custom layout — may differ.

Smart Merchandiser writes directly to catalog data in the corresponding environment using the platform’s native APIs (OCAPI). There is no locking — if a scheduled catalog import or feed also writes category position, whichever process writes last persists. Customers with jobs that set category position should sequence them so merchandising work isn’t overwritten.

Smart Merchandiser sequencing and sorting take effect only for categories whose sorting rule is based on category position. If a category uses a rule built on other SFCC parameters, category position is ignored and your Business Manager rule governs.

Smart Merchandiser writes catalog data to the connected environment as soon as the merchandiser commits an update. Most saves complete immediately; saving a category sequence runs in the background so the merchandiser can keep working, with a confirmation once it completes. Publishing to the storefront then flows through your existing Salesforce B2C Commerce processes — Smart Merchandiser does not trigger re-indexing or replication. Timing depends on your indexing and replication schedule.

Smart Merchandiser works the same way Business Manager does. Just as you have separate Business Manager instances for Development and Staging, each Smart Merchandiser account maps to one environment. Changes are not auto-promoted; replication flows through your existing Salesforce B2C Commerce processes.

OCAPI Data API and WebDAV access, a Business Manager account for catalog validation, and read-only analytics access. For Google Analytics, add our service account as a Viewer at the account or property level. For Adobe Analytics, grant developer access to Smart Merchandiser users and provide the report suite. No shared user credentials are required for analytics.

Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. An analytics connection powers analytics-driven sorting rules, the Analytics Overlay, Analytics Heat Map, KPI Dashboard, and KPI Analyzer. Without one, those features are unavailable; all other Smart Merchandiser features work independently.

Two: Leading Color and Leading Image. Both need custom code so the selected color and image display on the storefront after products are merchandised in Smart Merchandiser. Because every merchant’s storefront rendering is different, we review your storefront code and identify the customization points. Your development team implements and releases the changes through your standard development process. All other Smart Merchandiser features work without storefront changes.

In production we’ve supported catalogs of up to 100,000 SKUs, 15 sites on a single account, and 10 concurrent users. These reflect deployments to date rather than fixed ceilings. Share your catalog size, site count, and team size and we’ll confirm fit.

SSO is supported via Microsoft Azure (Entra ID); other identity providers can be reviewed for customization. Smart Merchandiser does not currently offer role-based permissions — all provisioned users have the same access within an account.

When a collection is sequenced or sorted in Smart Merchandiser — through drag and drop, a sorting rule, or Smart Sort — Smart Merchandiser sets the collection’s sort order to ‘Manually’ in Shopify. Collections previously using Best Selling, Newest, or another automatic sort will no longer apply that order once Smart Merchandiser sequences them.

Yes. The category tree flags smart collections, and the grid displays the products they contain. Because Shopify decides which products belong to a smart collection based on its conditions, the Clipboard’s Add, Replace, and Remove actions are disabled for these collections — the buttons appear grayed out. Sequencing and sorting still work.

Smart Merchandiser writes catalog data to Shopify through the GraphQL Admin API as soon as the merchandiser commits an update. Most saves complete immediately; saving a collection sequence runs in the background so the merchandiser can keep working, with a confirmation once it completes. From there, publishing to the storefront flows through Shopify’s own processes — Smart Merchandiser does not interface with caching or indexing.

A custom app in your Shopify store with access to the Admin API, and the Admin API access token provided to the onboarding team, along with collaborator access to the store. This is set up separately for your development store during onboarding and your live store ahead of go-live. For analytics, add our service account as a Viewer in Google Analytics, or grant developer access and provide the report suite for Adobe Analytics.

The custom app is scoped to product and publication data, with read access to metaobjects and translations. Write access is limited to products and publications — Smart Merchandiser requests no access to orders, customers, or payment data.

Each Smart Merchandiser account maps to one Shopify store, just as your Shopify Admin access is per store. Work done in a development store does not carry over to the live store — Smart Merchandiser does not export or import merchandising data between stores.