Overview

The Rule Inheritance feature lets you (merchandiser) automatically apply promotion rules set at the parent category level to all its subcategories.

With this feature, the Rules for a primary category apply to all its smaller categories. This saves time and ensures a consistent shopping experience everywhere.

For example, If you enable inheritance for a Boost rule (Boost brand = Nike) at the Men (Level 1) category:

• The same rule automatically applies to Shoes (Level 2) and Sneakers (Level 3).
• If you later create a separate Pin Rule for Sneakers (Level 3), this new pinning rule will only replace the inherited boost rule for that level.

This ensures that global rules stay consistent while still allowing flexibility at individual category levels.

Benefits of Rule Inheritance

• Saves time by reducing manual rule creation.
• Ensures consistent promotional experiences across categories.
• Gives flexibility to override rules at any level.
• Simplifies campaign management across large catalogs.

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Important Points to Remember

• Rules created at a parent category (Level 1) automatically apply to all its child categories (Level 2–Level 7).
• When inheritance is enabled, all subcategories inherit the same rule until a child category has its own rule, which means if a child category has an independent rule, it overrides the inherited rule from the parent at that specific level.
• Attribute-level operations such as boost, sort, and filter are automatically inherited since they are non-positional.
• Positional operations such as pin and slot inherit only if the pinned products exist in the child category.

Set up Rule Inheritance

Follow these steps to enable rule inheritance in the Browse section:

1. Navigate to the Browse Merchandising Dashboard.

2. Click Merchandising > Browse > Promotions.

3. Click Add rule promotion and set Set rule conditions. Click to select the category path. The category path screen appears. The options available here are:

Pick a path

Select from preset category paths already configured in your system. You view a list of categories with their hit counts. Select one from the list (like "Offers" which has 490595 hits).

Build a path

Create a custom category path by selecting specific fields.

Example: If you want to target a specific product category like Peanuts, you would drill down through multiple levels: start with the top-level category "Groceries" (id: 10051), then select "Food Cupboard" (id: 300635), followed by "Crisps Snacks Nuts" (id: 300638), then "Nuts Seeds Dried Fruit" (id: 300671), then "Natural Nuts" (id: 522670), and finally "Peanuts" (id: 522678).

This builds the complete path: Groceries>Food Cupboard>Crisps Snacks Nuts>Nuts Seeds Dried Fruit>Natural Nuts>Peanuts. This method gives you control over targeting specific subcategories within your catalogue.

Once done, click Apply.

4. Turn the Enable inheritance for all child categories toggle ON.

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   Important Point to Remember

   If inheritance is enabled at the parent level, publishing this rule will override it and its only applicable for category paths.

Refer to the table below to see the other fields available here.

5. Once you are done, click Next. The options available on this screen are as follows:

Design your merchandising strategy

With Query-specific rules, you can create rules using one or a combination of these options:

• Boost/Bury: Increase or decrease product visibility.
• Sort: Arrange products based on specific criteria.
• Pin: Fix key products at any exact position from 1 to 50.
• Slot: Assign multiple products to predefined positions in a single go.
• Filter: Exclude or include products from a superset.

5. Fill in these details, then click Publish Rule to activate it across the selected category and its child categories.

Rule Types and Inheritance Behaviour

Rule inheritance applies differently based on the type of merchandising rule you create. When you enable inheritance for a category path, all child categories automatically inherit applicable rules. This depends on whether the rule operates at an attribute level or a product level. Refer to the given table below for Rule Type vs Inheritance Behaviour:

Examples

Refer to the table to learn how rule inheritance behaves across different category levels Level 1(L1) > Level 2(L2) > Level 3(L3)