The display order of a category is a direct commercial lever: the first three products in a grid capture most of the clicks. PrestaShop lets you control it, but the native tool makes the job painful as soon as a category passes thirty or so references.
How PrestaShop stores position
Every product has a position per category, not a global position. The same product can therefore be first in one category and twentieth in another, which is exactly the intended behaviour.
That position is only used if the shop’s default sort is set to “position”. In the catalogue settings, if the default sort is “price ascending” or “name”, all your positioning work is ignored on the visitor side.
This is the first thing to check, and it explains most cases where manual ordering “does not work”.
The limits of the native back office
The interface exists: inside a category, the product list shows move arrows. Three limits make it unusable at scale.
One position at a time. Moving a product from position 40 to position 2 takes thirty-eight clicks, each with a page reload.
No overview. You see a text list, not the grid as the customer will see it. Yet order is judged visually, especially when images play off each other.
No decision data. The list shows neither stock, nor margin, nor recent sales. You are ordering blind.
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What overwrites your positions
Four operations reset all or part of the work, and they happen often.
- The CSV import. Depending on the options chosen, an import can reassign positions in file order. This is the most frequent cause of loss, and it goes unnoticed until somebody looks at the category.
- Adding a product to the category. The new product lands at the end of the list, which is logical, but a bulk addition sends all your new arrivals to the last page.
- Deletion or deactivation. It leaves a gap in the numbering, harmless in itself, but awkward for automated processing.
- Changing a product’s default category, which can alter its attachment and therefore its position.
The countermeasure is one rule: after every import, check a control category. Thirty seconds that save you from discovering the problem three weeks later.
Which sorting strategy
Ordering manually means knowing what to order on. Four approaches, to be combined.
By margin. Put the products that earn the most per sale at the top. Effective, but worth watching: if they are also the most expensive, you degrade the category’s conversion rate.
By turnover. Best sellers at the top. This is the natural reflex, and it is self-reinforcing: a well placed product sells, therefore stays well placed, which locks your catalogue in place.
By newness. Useful in seasonal or fashion worlds, counterproductive on a technical catalogue where the customer is looking for an established reference.
By availability. A cross-cutting rule to apply in every case: out-of-stock products drop to the end of the grid. A sold-out product in first position wastes the most valuable slot on the page.
A mixed approach works well: three to six slots ordered by hand according to your strategy of the moment, then an automatic sort for the rest.
The out-of-stock case
It deserves an explicit decision, and two options can be defended.
Pushing them to the end of the grid while keeping them visible preserves their ranking and lets you collect back-in-stock alert sign-ups.
Removing them from the category improves the immediate experience but makes pages that receive traffic disappear, and breaks external links.
The first option is almost always preferable, provided the stockout is announced clearly on the thumbnail and not only on the product page.
Measuring
Two metrics are enough to know whether your positioning work has an effect.
The click rate per position in the grid, which gives you the real value of each slot on your shop. It drops sharply after the first rows, and the slope varies by category.
The revenue per slot, which lets you compare two sorting strategies on the same category over two comparable periods.
The DataFirefly Product Positions module for PrestaShop handles this on PrestaShop 8 and 9: drag-and-drop reordering in a grid view, stock and sales figures shown to help you decide, and positions preserved after imports.
