How it works for your shoppers#
A home goods store has a “Living Room” category with 240 products. The shop owner picked an order years ago — alphabetical by SKU. Most visitors scroll through the first few rows and leave. With Smart Browse, the same page rearranges per visitor: someone who recently looked at couches sees couches first; someone who came in from a “modern lighting” Instagram ad sees lamps and pendant lights.
A fashion store’s “Summer Sale” page is editorial — the merchandiser hand-picked the order to lead with the best photography. They turn personalization off on this specific page so everyone sees the curated order. Other categories keep personalization on. Both behaviors live side by side, configured per category page.
Browse vs Search — which to use where#
Both surfaces use the same underlying personalization. The difference is what triggers them.
| Surface | Use |
|---|---|
| Search bar, search results page | Search — query-driven |
| Category landing page, “Shop All” | Browse — category-driven |
| Personalized homepage shelf | Recommendations (recommended_for_you) |
| “Similar items” or “Frequently bought together” on a product page | Recommendations |
Treating a category page as a Search-with-filter would technically work, but Browse is what powers the category-specific analytics in your dashboard. Use the right tool and the numbers line up.
How CartAmplify learns and improves#
Browse uses the same personalization model as Search — same visitor signals, same per-language training, same automatic retraining. The only difference is the input: Search starts from a query; Browse starts from a category.
For each visitor, the system asks: given everything this shopper has done on the store, which of the products in this category are they most likely to engage with? Then it reorders the category page accordingly.
What you can control#
In Dashboard → AI Features → Browse AI → Categories, you can configure each category page independently:
- Editorial collections (e.g. “Summer Lookbook”, a curated landing page) — Turn personalization off. Everyone sees the order you hand-picked.
- Generic categories (e.g. “Men’s Shirts”, “Living Room”) — Turn personalization on. Each visitor gets their own ordering.
Other controls you can set per browse widget:
- Default sort — What sort the shopper sees before they pick a different one (Relevance, Price, Popularity, etc.).
- Facets to show — Which filters appear in the sidebar.
- Out-of-stock handling — Filter out by default, or show with an indicator.