Product Sort Order API on BigCommerce
We are excited to announce that the BigCommerce Product Sort Order API is now available. This API gives developers the ability to choose the order of products in your catalog, and display those products programmatically through the API on the BigCommerce platform.
Why Product Sorting
Product sorting is an important aspect of visual merchandising that affects sales, conversions, and churn. Merchants with a large number of products can risk losing sales if shoppers can’t easily find what they are looking for on the first category page they view.
The ability to manage product sort order also allows agencies and merchants to update their sites accordingly with market trends. Prioritizing key products at certain times allows you to stay agile, ensure your site is displaying the most relevant products at the right time, and promoting products based on specific campaigns, inventory levels, and shopper demands.
Finally, in situations where one of your products appears in more than one category, we provide developers with the ability to change the priority of these products in each category.
Product Sorting Use Case
We are hitting mid summertime here in the United States, it is getting warmer and we are opting for sandals and shorts over closed-toed shoes and sandals. Merchants are wanting to prioritize these summery items over their winter and spring collections. Using the Product Sort Order API, developers programmatically update the entire product catalog to reflect the changing season in sub-seconds when compared to the time it would take to make manual updates by a merchandising team; this equates to crucial time savings for the merchant.
New API vs Existing Approaches
Before introducing the new Product Sort Order API, our approach to product sort order was limited to the UI which does not allow developers to specify sort order on the category level. With this release, we have removed these barriers, so developers can now make updates programmatically through API, specifying the sort order on the category level and make bulk update operations. A similar update to the UI is planned for a future release.
To avoid confusion between the new API and the existing approaches, we have developed a set of priorities on how products should be displayed on a storefront.
- Priority 1: Manually specified sort order on Category Level (API) new!
- Priority 2: Manually specified sort order on Product (Global) Level (UI/API)
- Priority 3: Default sorting by Product ID (newly added products go first) (UI/API)
In other words, if there is no preferred order value on the Category Level, products should be sorted by Product (Global) Level. If there are no preferred order values at the Product (Global) Level, products should be sorted by Product ID.
API Description
GET /catalog/category/{category_id}/products/sort-order
Returns a list of products with specified sort order value within a certain category
Parameters: Category Id
Responses:
200: description: Successful operation.
404: description: The requested Category was not found.
PUT /catalog/category/{category_id}/products/sort-order
Update sort order value for products within a certain category
Parameters: Category Id
Responses:
200: description: Successful operation.
404: description: The requested Category was not found.
422: description: Unprocessable entity.Please verify if all requested Products are assigned to the Category. Please verify if all required fields are present in the request body and are filled with values correctly.
Response example:
Conclusion
The new Product Sort Order API enables developers to effectively manage the items that display on any given category page, providing the best experience for both merchants and their customers alike. For more information, please check out our API Developer Documentation.
If you have any questions, BigCommerce is here to help. Please reach out in the comments below or find us on twitter under @BigCommerceDevs. We can’t wait to see what you build!
