Feed

A feed is a saved product source combined with an ordering.

Place a Product Feed block on a page and it renders an infinite product stream from that feed, reordered on a five-minute clock so returning shoppers meet a different arrangement.

The list at Storefront → Feed always contains an "All Products" feed. Deleting it recreates it.

How the order rotates

5 minutes   one window
16          orderings to draw from
~80 minutes a full cycle

A five-minute window selects one of sixteen orderings. Sixteen windows of five minutes is where the eighty-minute cycle comes from.

The order comes from the clock, not from who is looking.

That distinction carries the whole design. Personalised ordering would mean a different response for every visitor, and a response that differs per visitor cannot be cached — every shopper would wait for the catalog to be assembled for them.

Because the order is a function of the clock, everyone loading in the same window sees the same order, and one cached copy serves them all. The store gets variety and speed at the same time, instead of trading one for the other.

The shopper-facing effect is the point: someone who visits on Monday and again on Thursday does not meet the same eight products in the same positions.

Anchors

Rotation is not a shuffle of everything.

Under the ordered strategies, the first eight products hold in place as anchors, and only what follows rotates.

positions 1–8    anchors, held in place
position 9+      rotated by the window

Featured First would mean nothing if the featured products moved every five minutes. The anchors preserve the merchandising decision you made, while the long tail behind it gets a fair share of attention.

Random is the exception. It rotates the whole pool, anchors included, because there is no ordering decision to preserve.

When rotation switches off

Sorting or filtering through a Filter block switches rotation off entirely, so the chosen order is exact.

A shopper who has asked for "price, low to high" has stated what order they want. Rotating it would be overriding a direct instruction with a merchandising trick.

Defining a feed

1. Open Storefront → Feed and create a feed, or open the "All Products" feed already there.
2. Bind it to a collection, or leave it on the whole catalog.
3. Pick the ordering: Featured First, New Arrivals, Bestsellers, On Sale, or Random.
4. Set the scope: Global, or one market.
5. Turn on "Repeat products with different photos" if a product should reappear further down showing another image, and set the density — Low, Medium, or High — to control how often that happens.
6. Choose how a discount shows on the card: None, Badge, or Price.
7. Leave the feed Active.

One of those deserves a note. On Sale narrows the feed to products whose sale price is currently active, rather than sorting on a flag. A product marked as on sale whose sale window has closed is not in the feed, so the stream cannot advertise a discount the checkout will not honour.

A page bound to a missing or inactive feed refuses to render the stream, rather than falling back to arbitrary products. An empty section is a visible problem you will fix; a section quietly showing the wrong products is one you will not notice.

The stream is products only. Individual variants never get their own tile, so a shirt in six colours is one card, not six.

Placing it on a page

Add a Product Feed block to a page's rows and point it at the feed.

There is nothing special about the feed page:

/feed

is nothing more than a page whose rows contain a Product Feed block. Any page can carry one, and the dedicated route has no capability the others lack.

Page size and depth

Each load returns twenty products.

Infinite scroll reaches every eligible product. There is no hidden cap on how deep into the catalog a shopper can go — a large catalog is fully reachable, not truncated at some page limit.

Deciding what to build

Use one feed bound to the whole catalog when you want a browsing surface, and let the rotation do the merchandising.

Use a collection-bound feed when the section has a subject — a category page, a seasonal row, a landing page for a campaign.

Scope to a market when the same catalog should be ordered differently in different places; leave it Global otherwise.

Turn on photo repetition when your products photograph several ways and the stream is long enough that a second look is useful, not when the catalog is small enough to exhaust in one scroll.

And when you are tempted to lock an order down completely, remember what you are giving up:

Anchors are for the decisions you want honoured; rotation is for everything below them, where a fixed order just means the products at the bottom are never seen.

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