You spend thousands driving traffic to your Shopify store—TikTok ads, SEO, email flows—all engineered to land a high‑intent shopper on a collection page.
Then that page greets them with a wall of sold‑out badges and a top row still sorted by rules you set at launch and never touched again. That is the quiet revenue leak inside collection merchandising, and it appears the moment a store starts to scale: somewhere between $50K and $500K a month, when the catalog gets deep, best sellers go out of stock, and your highest‑margin products quietly sink to page three.
Julia Wawrzynek is the marketing manager at Mezereon, the team behind SortWise, a Shopify app that automates collection sorting, plus a broader suite of AI‑powered search and merchandising tools used across the Shopify ecosystem. She spends her days inside a problem most operators never think to audit: which products earn your prime digital shelf space—and which ones are silently torching your conversion rate and your ad spend.
In this conversation, Julia breaks down a simple framework for treating your collection pages like the digital shelf they actually are: the three layers of merchandising (AI, business rules, and manual control) that should work together instead of fighting each other, the two metrics that tell you exactly which page to fix first, and the three traps that catch even sharp operators. Whether you are a solo founder trying to buy back five hours a week or a $500K‑a‑month brand where two percent of shelf space is worth tens of thousands, this is the playbook.
Let’s dive in.
✅ Why 95% of shoppers never get past your first rows: Julia unpacks why those top 10–20 product slots are the only real estate that truly matters—and what it costs you every time they sit wasted.
✅ The “triple loss” behind every sold‑out item: It is not just the missed sale. Two more expensive hidden costs stack up behind every sold‑out badge.
✅ Why a sold‑out best seller is a silent killer: Shopify’s native sorting will not move it for you, and what happens next quietly drains the traffic you paid to acquire.
✅ The three‑layer merchandising system that actually scales: How AI, business rules, and manual drag‑and‑drop are meant to layer over each other—and why leaning on only one leaves real money on the table.
✅ The one metric Julia calls her North Star: Forget vanity numbers. There is a single measure that shows in real time which products are printing cash and where your hidden margin is buried.
✅ What changes between $50K and $500K a month: The same store, two very different merchandising problems—and the stage‑specific move that fits each one.
MAI Fulfillment is a 3PL partner for brands that have outgrown basic fulfillment but do not want to get lost inside a massive, inflexible network. We specialize in ecommerce fulfillment, B2B distribution, retail-ready shipping, inventory management, returns, and value-added services that help brands operate with more control and confidence. Our value is in the combination of technology, execution, and real partnership.
We give you real-time visibility, reliable workflows, and operational support that helps prevent small fulfillment issues from becoming expensive customer problems. Whether you are managing online orders, wholesale growth, seasonal spikes, or multi-channel complexity, MAI gives you the structure to scale without losing accuracy or service quality. We are practical, responsive, and built around your growth. That is what makes us different from 3PLs that treat every brand the same.
The big idea Julia keeps returning to: your collection pages are the digital shelf of your store, and most brands treat them like a filing cabinet. Walk into a good boutique and the front tables are not random; they hold the best, the newest, the most likely to sell. Your collection page should work the same way—except online the stakes are higher, because 95% of shoppers never scroll past the first page, and if they do not see something they want in the first two rows, they are gone.
The problem shows up the moment a store starts to scale. Shopify’s native sorting is blunt: alphabetical, by price, all‑time best sellers, or endless manual drag‑and‑drop. Picture a 500‑SKU store where the top seller sells out: Shopify leaves it sitting in prime position, so shoppers hit a dead end, get frustrated, and bounce. Julia calls a sold‑out item in your prime rows a triple loss: you lose the immediate sale, you waste the ad and SEO dollars that bought that visitor, and you damage the long‑term relationship when their first impression is a wall of grayed‑out badges.
Her fix is a three‑layer system, and the nuance is that the layers are supposed to work together. AI handles the real‑time heavy lifting (click‑through rate, conversions, revenue per view), business rules protect the context the AI cannot know (the overstock you must liquidate, the high‑margin pieces you want to surface), and manual drag‑and‑drop gives you creative control to pin hero products for a launch or Black Friday. The result is a page that blends popularity with profitability instead of forcing you to choose, with a validation shield that quietly demotes a high‑margin product if its click‑through rate is poor, so your storefront never starts to look like a clearance bin.
Julia also gets specific about stage. At $50K a month, merchandising automation is an insurance policy that buys back hours and plugs leaks, a hands‑off setup that can lift conversion without adding five hours to your week. At $500K a month, it becomes a revenue engine, where a one to two percent shift in shelf space can translate into tens of thousands of dollars. She walks through the two metrics worth watching, the three traps that catch even sharp operators, and a 24‑hour audit you can run tonight from your phone.
This is not theory. It is a practical blueprint for turning the page you already paid to fill with traffic into the highest‑leverage real estate in your store.
👉 Treat your collection page as prime real estate, not a filing cabinet. The first two rows do the overwhelming majority of the work, so every sold‑out or low‑margin item sitting there is costing you a sale you already paid to earn—audit your top 12 slots before you spend another dollar on traffic.
👉 Do not sort by popularity alone, or you create a doom loop. When your best seller stays on top purely because it is already on top, your higher‑margin “hidden gems” never get seen on page two—blend demand with profit so the products that actually move your bottom line earn the visibility.
👉 Bury the deadweight automatically. Out‑of‑stock and broken‑size items should fall to the bottom on their own, not after hours of weekly dragging, because paying premium ad rates to send high‑intent shoppers to a sold‑out button is the most avoidable leak in ecommerce.
👉 Let the AI run the day‑to‑day, but stay the captain. Julia’s rule of thumb is to trust automation for roughly 90% of routine optimization while you override for strategy, especially on new product lines the system has no history for—the system handles the micro‑adjustments, you set the direction.
👉 Watch revenue per view, not just traffic. If views climb but revenue per view falls, you are surfacing products people look at but do not buy, and RPV becomes the truth‑teller that flags exactly which collection to fix first.
👉 Set the guardrails, then stop micromanaging. A few clear rules (bury out‑of‑stock, protect high‑margin movers) beat a spider web of conditional logic that chokes the layout, so leave room for real‑time customer behavior to guide the page instead of locking it down.
Julia Wawrzynek
Marketing Manager, Mezereon Inc.
Julia Wawrzynek leads marketing at Mezereon Inc., the software company behind SortWise, a Shopify collection‑merchandising app, along with a broader suite of AI‑powered search and filter tools used across the Shopify ecosystem. Her work sits at the intersection of merchandising strategy and the day‑to‑day reality of running a growing catalog, which is why she can speak as fluently about a solo founder’s first 10 collections as she can about an enterprise brand managing thousands of SKUs.
SortWise reflects that range: it offers a free plan for smaller stores and scales up to AI‑driven sorting, rule‑based business logic, and built‑in collection analytics for larger brands, with hourly refreshes so sold‑out items move down and top performers stay visible. Merchant reviews consistently call out the team’s responsiveness and their willingness to ship features for specific use cases.
What makes Julia’s perspective valuable is that she is not selling a single tactic. She is teaching merchants how to think about their digital shelf—and where automation, rules, and human judgment each belong.
Over 9 seasons, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to chat with some of the brightest founders building amazing Shopify brands, as well as the partners shaping the app and marketing ecosystem. Every conversation has taught me something new, and I’m grateful for the chance to learn alongside you.
What matters most is that this podcast helps you solve real challenges and discover new ways to grow. Your support, feedback, and stories have made this journey truly special. Thanks for tuning in, sharing your wins and losses, and being part of the eCommerce Fastlane community.
Stay Connected: Leave an Honest Rating/Review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Follow & Subscribe on YouTube for new episodes.
Steve Hutt:
Hey there. Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I am your host, Steve Hutt. Today’s conversation is all about how the way your collection pages are sorted is quietly costing you sales. If you’ve spent a Sunday afternoon dragging products around inside the Shopify admin, trying to keep your best sellers near the top and sold-out items out of the way, this episode is for you. That manual job does not scale, and the results still usually are not optimized for what actually matters. There really is a line right now between sorting for popularity and sorting for profit, and I’d argue sorting for profit is the smarter long-term move.
Steve Hutt:
I really believe a lot of merchants are getting this wrong, which is why I have my guest on today, Julia from SortWise. SortWise is built for Shopify. They have a five-star rating in the Shopify App Store, and I recently wrote a listicle about top collection merchandising apps. Their solution ranked number one, which is why I decided to have them on the show. My hope is that we’re going to unpack what good collection merchandising actually looks like, why it matters to you, and what moves you can make this week, honestly right away, no matter where you are in your journey. You could be doing 10K a month or running a seven-figure operation—it doesn’t matter. This episode is for you.
Steve Hutt:
Hi Julia, welcome to eCommerce Fastlane.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Hi, thank you for having me. I’m super excited to share what SortWise is all about.
Steve Hutt:
So Julia, before we get into the SortWise story, can you set the stage a bit? Just so my audience understands, what is collection merchandising, and where does Shopify’s default approach to this start to break down for brands that are growing?
Julia Wawrzynek:
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s get into it. At its core, collection merchandising is just how you arrange your products online to guide customers and make more sales. Think of it like walking into a physical boutique. When you step through the doors, those front tables aren’t set up randomly. They’re specifically displaying the best, trendiest pieces to grab your attention at first glance. Digital merchandising is doing that exact same thing, just on your screen. And it’s honestly a make-or-break deal.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Modern shoppers have absolutely zero patience. Statistically, 95% of people never even scroll past the very first page of a collection. So those first 10 to 20 product slots are your real prime real estate. If someone doesn’t see something they love in the first two rows or so, they don’t keep scrolling—they click out.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Shopify’s default setup usually starts breaking down the moment a brand starts to successfully scale. Out of the box, Shopify’s native sorting tools are super basic. You’re pretty much stuck with rigid, static rules like sorting alphabetically, by price, or all-time best sellers, or you’re forced to drag and drop everything manually.
Julia Wawrzynek:
That manual trap is obviously a massive time sink for businesses. Let’s say you have a growing store with about 500 SKUs. If your top seller goes out of stock, Shopify doesn’t automatically move it. It just sits there at the top of your page. When a customer clicks on it, they hit a sold-out dead end, get frustrated, and click out. To fix that natively, a merchant has to spend hours every single week manually dragging things around just to bury out-of-stock items and push new arrivals up. It’s not realistic. It’s not scalable. You can’t stay up 24/7 monitoring inventory, trends, and margins across dozens of collection pages.
Julia Wawrzynek:
That’s the exact breaking point, and honestly, it’s why we built SortWise—to automate that entire headache.
Steve Hutt:
All right, so walk me through what’s actually happening when a shopper clicks on a product on a collection page and it redirects them to a sold-out listing. Why does that one experience cost more than merchants realize?
Julia Wawrzynek:
Absolutely. It’s a silent killer, but it’s actually a little more subtle than that. Realistically, most shoppers won’t even click on a sold-out item since there’s a badge indicating it on the collection page. The real problem is the wasted real estate. Imagine a shopper landing on your page and the first two very critical rows are just grayed-out, sold-out, out-of-stock items. They’re not necessarily clicking those, but they’re also not seeing the products they actually want to purchase.
Julia Wawrzynek:
I call it a triple loss. First, you obviously lose the immediate sale. Second, you’ve completely wasted your acquisition dollars. You paid for ads or SEO to get that traffic in the first place, and now you’re not showing the right products—or worse, you’re showing empty shelves. Third, you’ve hurt long-term customer value. If their first impression is a wall of sold-out badges, they probably won’t ever come back. As the store scales, this becomes a manual nightmare. Best sellers naturally go out of stock, but because they’re best sellers, they stay at the top. You end up paying premium ad dollars just to show people what they can’t have.
Julia Wawrzynek:
That’s why automating this—instantly pushing sold-out items to the bottom—isn’t just about saving time. It’s about making sure every pixel of your collection page is working to get you a sale.
Steve Hutt:
Now, SortWise is one of the only apps I know that combines three different things in one platform: rule-based automation, visual drag-and-drop for some manual work, and AI-powered sorting. Most tools kind of force merchants to pick one of those. Why do you think you actually need all three, and when they work together, what are the benefits?
Julia Wawrzynek:
Yeah, this is really the core of our philosophy. Most tools force you into a corner, meaning you’re either going all in on automation or you’re stuck doing everything manually. But in the real world of ecommerce, you actually need all three working together to get the best results.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Think of it like this: the AI handles the heavy lifting. It’s looking at real-time data like click-through rates, conversions, and revenue per view, constantly tweaking the page to manage your sales 24/7. But AI isn’t perfect because it doesn’t know your business context. That’s where rules come in to protect your business logic. For example, the AI doesn’t know that you have excess inventory in a warehouse that you absolutely must liquidate, or that you have specific high-margin products you want to prioritize. Rules like that set the guardrails.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Then you have visual drag-and-drop for that human touch. Sometimes you just need creative control. Let’s say it’s Black Friday or you’re launching a brand new collection—you want to manually pin your hero products right at the top of your grid. The real magic is that all three don’t fight each other. They layer over each other. You get the speed and efficiency of AI, the safety of your business rules, and the creative control of the human merchandiser. That means your pages are always optimized and you’re always in the driver’s seat.
Steve Hutt:
Most stores—really any store—can sort by best sellers. That’s a default in a lot of themes. But I believe the sharper operators listening want merchandising for profit, not just popularity. How does a merchant use SortWise to surface their highest-margin products without making the storefront feel like a clearance bin?
Julia Wawrzynek:
This is a big one, because most default setups sort by popularity, meaning whatever sells the most volume sits at the top. But as any operator knows, volume doesn’t always equal profit. You could be selling thousands of a cheap, low-margin T-shirt while your highest-margin jacket is buried on page three.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Merchants are terrified that if they force high-margin items to the top, the page will look disjointed or, worse, like a clearance bin of stuff they’re desperate to get rid of. Customers can smell that lack of curation a mile away, and they’ll click out. We solve this at SortWise by blending popularity with profitability instead of making you choose one or the other.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Our algorithm treats profit margin as a weighted factor alongside actual customer demand. It looks for that sweet spot: products that are both trending with buyers and highly lucrative for your bottom line. Second, we have what we call a smart invalidation shield. If a high-margin product has terrible click-through rates or poor conversions, the system naturally pushes it back down. It prevents you from forcing a dud into your prime digital real estate just because a spreadsheet says it has a great margin.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Third, you can set contextual rules. For example, you can say, “Only boost high-margin items if they have at least a 4.5-star rating and are fully in stock.” The end result is that your storefront stays beautifully curated and highly relevant to the customer, but behind the scenes you’re silently steering traffic toward items that put the most actual dollars into your bank account. It’s merchandising for your bottom line, not just the top line.
Steve Hutt:
Every Shopify app right now seems to claim AI in their marketing. It feels like table stakes. What is your AI actually doing under the hood? What data is it analyzing, and how does a merchant know when to trust it versus overriding manually?
Julia Wawrzynek:
Yes, AI has definitely become a bit of a hollow buzzword. Many apps are just running basic scripts. We built actual machine learning that’s constantly crunching live metrics like click-through rates and, more importantly, revenue per view—also known as RPV. RPV is our North Star because it tells us exactly which products are generating cash in real time.
Julia Wawrzynek:
I tell merchants to trust the AI for about 90% of day-to-day optimization. That’s the stuff that’s impossible for a human to track. But you should still be reviewing and overriding it for strategy. If you’re launching a fresh product line, the AI has no history to work with. That’s when you step in. It’s like autopilot: the system handles the micro-adjustments, but the merchant is still the captain in the cockpit. That’s very important to remember.
Steve Hutt:
You’ve built collection analytics directly into the SortWise app. What metrics should a merchant be watching to know if their merchandising is actually working? That’s the first part. The second part is: what’s the difference between a collection that’s performing really well and one where we might need to rethink the execution?
Julia Wawrzynek:
We realized merchants were flying blind, so we built analytics right into the app. You really only need to watch two metrics: click-through rate by position—also known as CTR—and RPV. CTR by position tells you if your prime real estate, those top two defining rows, is actually working. If you have high collection views but no clicks, you’re showing the wrong products.
Julia Wawrzynek:
RPV is the ultimate truth-teller. It measures the cash generated every time a page loads. If your traffic is up but RPV is down, you’re burying the items people actually want to buy. With SortWise, you don’t have to guess. The dashboard literally flags collections that have high traffic but low RPV so you know exactly which page to fix first.
Steve Hutt:
There are many different types of brands listening to this podcast. Everyone has a different entrepreneurial journey and different levels of complexity. Some stores are doing 50K a month, and others are doing upwards of 500K a month. I’d argue they both have a collection problem, but it probably looks a bit different depending on complexity and GMV. Can you talk about those two levels for me? Where should each type of brand focus today?
Julia Wawrzynek:
This is such an important distinction. Scaling an ecommerce business isn’t just about getting bigger—it completely changes the physics of your storefront. When you’re at $50,000 a month versus $500,000 a month, your pain points look completely different.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Let’s start with $50,000 a month. At this stage, your biggest bottleneck is usually bandwidth and baseline conversion. You’re likely a very small team, maybe even a solo founder wearing ten different hats. You don’t have time to sit in Shopify and drag and drop items manually every day. Your focus here is simply plugging leaks and buying back your time.
Julia Wawrzynek:
You need basic, hands-off automation: set up rules to automatically push out-of-stock items to the bottom and let a smart sort handle the rest. You want a system that gives you a nice lift in conversion—say 10%—without adding five hours to your workweek.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Now if you’re a $500,000-a-month merchant, you’ve already solved product-market fit, but your catalog has likely exploded. Your problem is different. It’s inefficiency and missed margin. You have deep collections, massive traffic, and serious data complexity. Because you have so many products, your highest-margin items—or what you might call hidden gems—are constantly being buried.
Julia Wawrzynek:
At this scale, your focus has to shift to algorithmic optimization and profit. You need predictive AI analyzing real-time intent data, click-through rates, and RPV. You should also be layering business rules on top of that AI to deliberately steer traffic toward your profitable SKUs.
Julia Wawrzynek:
To put it in perspective, a $50,000-a-month merchant uses a collection tool like an insurance policy—it saves time and stops silly mistakes. At $500,000 a month, it’s a sophisticated revenue engine where even a 1% or 2% optimization in shelf space can translate into tens of thousands of dollars straight into your bottom line.
Steve Hutt:
What are some of the biggest mistakes you see merchants make when they finally start taking collection merchandising seriously? Are there any traps that even smart operators fall into?
Julia Wawrzynek:
Yep, even the sharpest operators I know fall into these traps because merchandising feels very intuitive. But in ecommerce, human intuition often loses to data. When merchants finally decide to take this seriously, they almost always hit three massive potholes.
Julia Wawrzynek:
The first is what I call the “set it and forget it” delusion. A merchant will spend an entire weekend setting up the perfect collection layout. It looks beautiful, it’s aligned with their brand strategy, and they walk away. Two weeks later, trends have shifted, inventory levels have dropped, and that perfect layout is completely out of date. Merchandising isn’t a project you check off a list. It’s a living, breathing process.
Julia Wawrzynek:
The second is the popularity bias trap. This is where smart operators sort purely by their historical best sellers. It makes sense on paper, but it creates a dangerous doom loop. If product A is at the top, it gets all the traffic, so it keeps selling, which keeps it at the top. Meanwhile, product B, which might have a much higher profit margin or better conversion rate, is buried on page two where nobody sees it. Sorting purely by popularity hides your actual growth drivers.
Julia Wawrzynek:
The third trap is overcomplicating things with way too many rules. We see merchants open up SortWise and go rule-crazy. They’ll create logic chains like, “If it’s red, and if it’s under $50, but only if it’s over four stars, and only on Tuesdays,” and so on. They build a spider web of conflicting rules that completely chokes the layout. This over-optimization makes the page feel rigid and doesn’t leave room for real-time customer behavior to guide the algorithm.
Julia Wawrzynek:
My biggest takeaway is that you want to set the guardrails, but not micromanage the entire highway. Use rules to enforce your critical business logistics—like burying out-of-stock items—but then trust real-time data to handle the day-to-day heavy lifting.
Steve Hutt:
For a merchant listening right now who wants to act on this information and do something in the next 24 hours, what’s the highest-leverage thing they should do?
Julia Wawrzynek:
Thank you for asking. If you want to immediately stop a massive revenue leak in the next 24 hours, you can do this tonight. Go audit your top three highest-traffic collection pages, and don’t look at your analytics dashboard. Actually go to your storefront on your phone and look at those collections exactly like a customer would.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Count how many out-of-stock items, low-margin accessories, or slow-moving items are sitting in your top 12 product slots. For most growing brands, the first page is littered with digital dead ends or items that don’t move the needle for your bottom line.
Julia Wawrzynek:
To fix it instantly, you don’t need a massive multi-week strategy. Just implement two basic guardrails. First, bury the dead weight. Set a hard rule that automatically pushes out-of-stock items or products with broken size runs to the absolute bottom of your page. Stop paying premium ad dollars to send high-intent traffic to a sold-out button.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Second, prioritize your high-margin movers. Take your top-performing, highest-margin products and explicitly pin them to the top two rows so they get maximum visibility. That alone will instantly protect your conversion rates, lift your average order value, and buy your team back hours of manual dragging and dropping.
Julia Wawrzynek:
If you don’t want to do that manually every week, that’s exactly why we offer a completely free trial of SortWise. You can plug it in, set up those two rules in 10 minutes, and watch your revenue per view climb on autopilot while you sleep.
Steve Hutt:
As we wrap up today’s show, do you have any final thoughts or takeaways you’d like to share with our listeners?
Julia Wawrzynek:
If I could leave your listeners with one final thought, it would be this: stop treating your collection pages like a digital filing cabinet. For years, the ecommerce playbook has been about spending thousands on TikTok ads, optimizing SEO, and building beautiful email flows just to get people to your site.
Julia Wawrzynek:
But if you’re driving all that expensive, high-intent traffic to a collection page that’s unorganized, full of out-of-stock items, or sorted by static, outdated rules, you’re literally tripping at the finish line. Your collection pages are the digital shelf of your store. In a physical shop, you’d never let your worst-selling or out-of-stock products clutter the front entrance while your profitable items are hidden in the back room.
Julia Wawrzynek:
As you head into your next growth phase, challenge your team to treat digital merchandising with the same respect you treat your ad creative. When you combine smart automation, profit-driven data, and beautiful curation, you’re not just saving hours of busy work—you’re unlocking a massive hidden revenue lever that was already sitting right under your nose.
Steve Hutt:
What do you recommend as next steps for listeners who want to learn more about SortWise?
Julia Wawrzynek:
The easiest next step is to head to the Shopify App Store and search for SortWise. We know how busy merchants are, so we made getting started completely frictionless. We offer a 100% free plan for smaller stores that are just starting out. For larger brands, you can jump into a free trial to test the full AI capabilities and rule systems completely risk-free.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Installation takes literally two clicks. It syncs with your store in the background, and you can have your first two automation guardrails—like automatically burying out-of-stock items—set up in less than 10 minutes.
Steve Hutt:
Julia, thanks again for sharing your insights and recommendations today. This has been a great conversation, packed with strategy and real tactics. I really believe merchants can take action and use what they’ve learned today. I know I picked up a few things, and I hope everyone listening did too. For anyone whose collection pages have been quietly nagging at them, this is likely your sign to check out SortWise and see what it can do for your store. Julia, thanks so much for being on the show and transparently sharing today.
Julia Wawrzynek:
Thank you so much for having me on. It has been an absolute pleasure chatting with you, and thank you to everybody for listening.
Steve Hutt:
That’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. It’s my hope that this podcast is offering you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my personal goal to help you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful and thriving company powered by Shopify. Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I’m so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.
