How Listings Are Ordered
Why the order you see is not the order you set, and the one setting that quietly overrides every sort in the shop.
Shop pages, category pages, search results and the product blocks on your home page each decide an order. Four things feed into that decision, and they do not have equal weight. Knowing the order they apply in explains almost every "why is that book first?" question.
What Decides the Order
In this order, top to bottom:
1. Show First. A product with Show First ticked floats above everything else. So does every product of a brand that is pinned. Nothing a shopper chooses moves them.
2. Display Priority. Within that, a higher number comes first. It applies to all products, not only pinned ones, so it quietly breaks ties everywhere in the shop.
3. The sort the shopper picked. Newest, price, name or bestselling.
4. Whatever the database happens to return, for products that tie on all of the above.
A Pinned Brand Changes Every Listing in the Shop
This is the one that catches people. Pinning a brand with several hundred products puts all of them above everything else, in every sort, on every page. A shopper who chooses Newest gets the pinned brand's titles first, oldest ones included, and the genuinely new titles further down. Nothing on the page says this is happening.
It may be exactly what you want, a publisher's own titles ahead of what it distributes. It is worth deciding on purpose rather than discovering through a customer.
The Three Flags Do Different Jobs
They sound similar and overlap not at all.
| Flag | What it does |
|---|---|
| Featured | Chooses what a Featured block shows. Changes no ordering. |
| New | Puts a New badge on the product and fills a New block. Changes no ordering. |
| Show First | Changes ordering everywhere. Shows no badge. |
So a product can be flagged New and sit on page four, and a product with no badge at all can lead every page in the shop.
Use New for the Badge, Show First for the Position
If you want a title to lead the shop, Show First is the only one that does it. If you want it marked as recent, New is the one. Wanting both means ticking both.
What Newest Means
Newest sorts by publication date, not by the day you added the product.
That is deliberate, and it matters most for a catalogue that came from another system: every one of those records was created on the day it was imported, so sorting by that gives an arbitrary order with no relation to anything a shopper would call new. A product with no publication date sorts after everything that has one, rather than before it.
If your newest page looks wrong, the usual cause is missing publication dates rather than a broken sort. A product with no date cannot be placed among the dated ones, so it goes to the back.
Searching Changes the Rules
When a shopper searches, how well a product matches comes first, because a search that ignores relevance is not a search. Show First still applies, and the sort they chose becomes a tie breaker among equally good matches.
This is why the same product can be first in a category and halfway down a search for its own title: a better match outranked it.
New Releases Links
A link that promises new releases should point at the products flagged New, not at the shop sorted by date. These are different sets and will not agree: one is what somebody decided to badge, the other is what the calendar says.
Add ?new=1 to a shop link to list exactly the products flagged New, which is the same set your New block shows.
When the Order Looks Wrong
An old product leads every page. Show First on the product, or on its brand.
A whole publisher leads every page. That brand is pinned.
Newest starts years ago. Either a pinned brand is floating older titles above, or the newest titles have no publication date.
Two products keep swapping places. They tie on everything, so the order is arbitrary and can change between page loads. Give one a Display Priority to settle it.
A New badge but nowhere near the front. Working as intended. New is a badge, not a position.