The ten signals, and what each one needs

A shopper group’s ranking is a weighted mix of ten signals. You choose which ones matter and how much — that mix is the rule, and it is yours to read and change. This page is what each signal actually measures, and what it needs before it does anything.

The ten

Signal	What it boosts
Recently viewed	Products the visitor browsed in this session or recent ones
Favorite category affinity	Products whose category or attributes match the visitor’s profile
Cart history	Products the visitor has added to cart, now or before
Repeat purchase	Products the visitor bought before — for reorder flows
Top sellers	Shop-wide bestsellers, inside the collection’s window
New arrivals	Products released in roughly the last 30 days
Session intent	Products similar to what the visitor clicked in this visit
Return rate penalty	Lowers products with a high historical return rate
Price affinity	Products near the price band this visitor browses or buys in, fading as the price moves away
Emotional affinity	Products whose tags match the shopper’s read state

Most of these work on a stranger

This is the part worth internalising, because it is the opposite of how recommendation engines usually work: eight of the ten need no purchase history and no login.

Top sellers, New arrivals and Return rate penalty are facts about your catalogue — they apply to anyone. Recently viewed, Session intent, Cart history and Price affinity are read from the visit happening right now, so they start working within a few pageviews. Favorite category affinity builds from browsing.

Only Repeat purchase genuinely requires a shopper who has bought before.

The two that need something first

Two signals will sit in your mix scoring nothing at all unless a condition is met, and neither announces it:

Repeat purchase only applies to products marked replenishable — consumables you would expect somebody to buy again. That is deliberate: re-surfacing a mattress to the person who just bought one is noise. But the flag is a product metafield, and it is not filled in for you. Until something sets it, this signal returns nothing for every product. If you sell consumables and you weight it, set the flag first.

Emotional affinity needs Emotional Suggest switched on in Settings, and the plan that carries it. Weighted without that, it contributes nothing.

Weighting them

Give more weight to what should decide more. There is no correct set — a fashion store leaning on New arrivals and a supplement store leaning on Repeat purchase are both right, because they sell differently.

Two habits that help: start with two or three signals rather than all ten, and change one thing at a time so you can tell what moved. See Create a segment rule for the workflow, and How segment matching works for how a shopper is routed to a group.