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Multi-Objective Optimization

Multi-objective optimization balances multiple business goals simultaneously—conversion, revenue, profit margin, inventory turnover, and customer experience—rather than optimizing for a single metric.

Overview

Real-world ecommerce requires balancing multiple objectives. Multi-objective optimization finds the optimal balance between competing goals, ensuring you don't sacrifice one important metric for another.

How Multi-Objective Optimization Works

Multi-objective optimization is configured through global rules in the merchandising console. The system optimizes based on default signals (purchases and conversion), and you can optionally add additional features to fine-tune the optimization.

Default Optimization Signals

By default, multi-objective optimization uses:

  • Purchases: Products that customers actually buy
  • Conversion: Products that convert from search to purchase

These default signals ensure that optimization is grounded in actual customer behavior and business results.

Configuring Multi-Objective Optimization

  1. Navigate to Merchandising → Merchandising Controls
  2. Select Global Rules (applies to all searches or all collections)
  3. Enable Multi-Objective Optimization:
  4. Toggle Multi-Objective Optimization to On
  5. Configure default objectives (optional):
  6. Adjust weights for Purchases and Conversion if needed
  7. Add optional features:
  8. Click Add Feature to include additional optimization signals
  9. Select from available features or create custom features:
    • Sponsored: Boost sponsored or vendor-funded products
    • Gross Margin: Optimize for products with higher profit margins
    • Size Brokenness: Prioritize products with better size availability (fewer broken sizes)
    • Inventory Level: Promote products with higher inventory
    • Revenue: Optimize for higher revenue per product
    • Custom features: Add any other product attributes or business metrics
  10. Set feature weights:
  11. Use sliders to adjust the weight of each feature
  12. Higher weights mean that feature has more influence on rankings
  13. Set constraints (optional):
  14. Minimum conversion rate threshold
  15. Minimum customer experience score
  16. Maximum inventory level to promote
  17. Save and activate the global rules

Optional Features

You can add any of these optional features (or create custom ones):

  • Sponsored: Boost products that are sponsored or vendor-funded
  • Gross Margin: Prioritize products with higher profit margins
  • Size Brokenness: Favor products with better size availability (fewer broken sizes)
  • Inventory Level: Promote products with higher inventory levels
  • Revenue: Optimize for higher revenue per product
  • Custom Features: Add any other product attributes or business metrics that matter to your business

Each feature can be weighted independently, allowing you to create a custom optimization strategy that matches your business priorities.

Best Practices

  1. Start with defaults: Begin with purchases and conversion, then add features as needed
  2. Add features strategically: Only add features that meaningfully impact your business goals
  3. Monitor performance: Track how adding features affects overall performance
  4. Set weights carefully: Higher weights have more influence—use them judiciously
  5. Use constraints: Set minimum thresholds to ensure critical objectives don't fall below acceptable levels
  6. Test changes: Use A/B testing to validate that feature additions improve business outcomes
  7. Review regularly: Periodically review whether all features are still needed and weights are appropriate