---
name: domain-ecommerce-search-merchandising-5b06e42ac232
description: |
  Search and merchandising for e-commerce: product search relevance tuning, faceted navigation,
  recommendation engine patterns (collaborative filtering, content-based), A/B testing for
  layouts, personalization, and SEO for product pages.
allowed-tools: Read, Grep, Glob, Bash
---

# Search and Merchandising

## When to use
- Selecting or tuning a product search engine (Elasticsearch, Algolia, Typesense, Meilisearch)
- Implementing or improving search relevance (field boosting, synonyms, function scoring)
- Building faceted navigation with dynamic facet counts and URL-preserving filters
- Implementing a recommendation engine (collaborative filtering, content-based, or hybrid)
- Running A/B tests on search ranking, listing layouts, or recommendation placements
- Adding personalization to search results, homepage, or email recommendations
- Implementing technical SEO for product pages (schema.org, canonical URLs, hreflang, sitemaps)

## Core principles
1. **Boost by behavior, not just text match** — sales count and view count as function score signals outperform pure BM25 for commerce
2. **Facet counts must stay accurate under multi-select** — post-filter aggregations; users abandon nav when counts are wrong
3. **Cold start kills collaborative filtering** — always have a content-based fallback for new users and new products
4. **Canonical every filter combination** — faceted nav generates thousands of URL permutations; without canonicals, you split ranking signals
5. **Hash user ID for A/B assignment** — session-based assignment causes variant flicker on login; user ID gives consistent experience

## Reference Files
- `references/search-facets-recommendations.md` — search engine selection, relevance tuning, autocomplete, facet types and implementation, collaborative/content-based/hybrid recommendation patterns and placement strategy
- `references/abtesting-personalization-seo.md` — what to A/B test in search and merchandising, feature flag implementation, personalization pipeline, schema.org markup, technical SEO for product pages


---
Source attribution: rnavarych
Original project: https://github.com/rnavarych/alpha-engineer/blob/c5b74102c7fd584af3d344ba7c331a7bbec3c729/plugins/domains/domain-ecommerce/skills/search-merchandising/SKILL.md
License: MIT
License information: https://opensource.org/license/mit
Original upstream instructions; downloaded from Dave AI.

## Upstream license notice

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2026 Raman Navarych

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.



# Dave AI resource metadata

Creator / publisher: rnavarych
Original project: https://github.com/rnavarych/alpha-engineer/blob/c5b74102c7fd584af3d344ba7c331a7bbec3c729/plugins/domains/domain-ecommerce/skills/search-merchandising/SKILL.md
Attribution basis: Source repository record

Fields of work: Marketing
Roles: Content Marketer, Growth Marketer, Marketing Analyst, Product Marketer, SEO Specialist
Specialties: Specialty not specified
Tools: Algolia, Elasticsearch, Meilisearch, Typesense
Country applicability: Country not specified
Classification basis: Source catalog labels
Instruction SHA-256: 17c96ba81cfee933c6e10cf5db3f9a9708f315df67ae4505d49d79b3022ba1ec