# Planera Full Help Documentation This file combines Planera's public help pages for AI assistants and support workflows. # Planera Merchandising Automation Source: https://planera-shopify.ramiapps.com/ # Planera Merchandising Automation Planera is for established Shopify stores that have outgrown manual collection merchandising and want more automation without giving up control. As a Shopify catalog grows, collection work usually gets less tidy. Sales need temporary changes, stock moves around, best sellers shift, and manual sorting starts to take more attention than it should. Planera is built around three main tools: - Advanced Sort for more detailed product ordering. - Campaigns for planned collection updates. - Hybrid Collections for manual collections that Planera can populate from richer rules. - Choosing a Plan for understanding managed collections and plan fit. Each tool can be used on its own. They are often more useful when combined: - Use Advanced Sort to prioritize discounted products that are still in stock. - Schedule a Campaign to switch a collection into night-time mode from 6 PM to 6 AM. - Build a Hybrid Collection that refreshes around products with the strongest weekly performance. ## A practical way to think about Planera 1. Choose what should change in the collection. 2. Decide which product signals or rules should guide the change. 3. Let Planera apply it at the right time or during sync. ## Where to start If you are new to Planera, start with the thing you want to improve first. If your products are already in the right collection but the order needs more specific rules, start with Advanced Sort. If you want to plan a temporary sale, seasonal launch, or collection update, start with Campaigns. If Shopify smart collections feel too limited, or you want product selection based on richer signals like weekly sales, monthly sales, growth trends, gross profit, or grouped AND/OR conditions, start with Hybrid Collections. If you are comparing tiers, start with Choosing a Plan. The most important concept is managed collections: collections where Advanced Sort or Hybrid Collections are enabled. ## Why merchants use Planera Most stores start with simple collections. As the catalog grows, merchandising gets harder: sold-out products drift upward, promos need setup, best sellers change, and the same collection may need to behave differently during launches, sales, and quiet weeks. Planera helps move some of that repeated work into reusable merchandising logic. Your team still decides what should happen; Planera handles more of the timing and application. ## Image Planera overview showing Campaigns, Advanced Sort, and Hybrid Collections as three connected merchandising tools. Alt text: Planera overview showing Campaigns, Advanced Sort, and Hybrid Collections as three connected merchandising tools. ## Key details - Planera is a Shopify merchandising automation app for established stores. - The three current pillars are Advanced Sort, Campaigns, and Hybrid Collections. - Advanced Sort changes collection product order using richer signals like weekly sales, monthly sales, growth trends, gross profit, and grouped AND/OR conditions. - Campaigns manage calendar events or daily/weekly scheduled collection updates. - Hybrid Collections are manual Shopify collections that Planera can populate from rules. - Plan fit mostly depends on managed collections, active campaigns, and Advanced Sort product limits. - These public docs are for both current users and potential users evaluating Planera. - Published at planera-shopify.ramiapps.com from the planera-site repository. - Build locally: npm run build (output in public_html/). --- # Advanced Sort Source: https://planera-shopify.ramiapps.com/advanced-sort.html # Advanced Sort Shopify's built-in sort options are useful: manual order, best selling, alphabetical, price, and creation date. Planera Advanced Sort is for collection merchandising that needs more flexibility than one standard sort can provide. A high-SKU Shopify store may need to sort products by recent sales, stock status, discounts, product tags, newness, growth trends, aging inventory, or selected metafields. A merchandising team may also want to shuffle top best-selling products, shuffle all products, group products by tags, or rotate featured products when the sort runs. Advanced Sort helps automate product ordering so collections stay intentional as products, inventory, discounts, and sales performance change. For stores with active merchandising, it reduces repetitive manual reordering while giving teams more control over what shoppers see first. ## Why this matters Collection order affects what shoppers notice first. A bestseller collection should usually show strong performers, but not if the best performers are out of stock. A sale collection should show discounted products quickly. New products can stay pinned near the top for 7 days, or any number of days that fits the store. A homepage featured collection should not look frozen for weeks. Manual ordering can work for small or rarely changed collections. But in a fast-moving catalog, product order can become stale quickly as inventory, discounts, and sales performance change. Advanced Sort gives teams a way to organize collections with sorting rules instead of constant manual dragging. The result is storefront merchandising that feels more active, controlled, and responsive. ## How Advanced Sort works Advanced Sort uses synced product information, sales data, and the sorting logic you choose. Depending on your setup, Planera can sort products by: - product details - stock status - discount status - product tags - new-product status - weekly sales - monthly sales - growth trends - aging inventory - selected product metafields, such as customer rating, review count, margin tier, material, season, or internal priority Planera calculates the product order and applies it to the Shopify collection. In Planera, Advanced Sort can be used as a permanent collection sorting strategy. It can also be used in a Campaign when the collection order should change for a specific period: sale, launch, season, or promo window. ## Advanced Sort ideas Use Advanced Sort when the same collection should stay organized, fresh, and commercially useful as products and sales change. ### Bestseller with stock protection Sort products by recent sales, but push sold-out products lower in the collection. Why it works: shoppers still see strong performers first, but unavailable products do not occupy the best positions. ### Fresh new arrivals Bring new products to the top while they are still fresh. Why it works: new products get early visibility without requiring someone to manually move them every week. ### Sale collection with discounted products first Promote discounted products to the top of a sale collection. Why it works: shoppers opening a sale collection see relevant sale items immediately. ### Shuffle top products Sort the collection first, then shuffle only the top 8, 12, or 20 products. Why it works: strong products stay visible, but the first row does not feel locked in place. ### Featured product rotation Rotate featured products when the sort runs, such as moving the top 4 products through the most visible positions. Why it works: the homepage can feel fresh after each scheduled update while the collection keeps a controlled structure. ### Shuffle all products Use this when the whole collection can appear in a fresh order. Example: Shuffle all products in a large discovery or inspiration collection every week. Why it works: older products get another chance to be seen, and the collection feels less static. ### Group, then sort Use this when some product groups should appear before others. Example: Show products tagged premium first, then new, then clearance, with each group sorted by recent sales. Why it works: the collection structure stays intentional while performance data still shapes the order inside each group. ## How to set it up 1. Go to Collections and open the collection you want to organize. 2. Enable Advanced Sort for that collection. 3. Choose the main sorting direction, such as recent sales, monthly gross profit, newness, price, inventory, tags, or a selected metafield. 4. Add extra rules such as pushing sold-out products down, pinning new products to the top, promoting discounted products, grouping by tags, shuffle, or rotation. 5. Review the result and sync the collection to apply the new order. After that, Planera can refresh the order at the app's configured sync time, once or multiple times per day depending on the plan and settings. ## What to expect Advanced Sort works best when product and sales data are synced and up to date. Planera regularly refreshes its product cache with efficient incremental updates, while order and sales analytics are typically updated overnight. Some sorting strategies are more stable, such as sorting by price, title, or fixed tag groups. Others respond to changing data, such as recent sales, inventory, discounts, newness, or growth trends. Shuffle top # adds controlled variation after sorting; rotation moves featured products through visible positions when the sort runs. Use stable sorts when the collection needs consistency. Use shuffle or rotation when freshness and product exposure matter more. If some products are missing a selected value, Planera can still sort the collection where possible. For example, products without a selected metafield or sales value can be placed after products with stronger matching data. ## Image placeholder Suggested image path: ./assets/advanced-sort-builder.png Alt text: Advanced Sort builder showing product sorting options such as sales, stock status, discounts, tags, shuffle, rotation, and metafields. Capture or design idea: Use a screenshot of the Advanced Sort settings page showing a main sort rule, sold-out handling, discount handling, tag grouping, and shuffle or rotation options. If designing an illustration, show product cards being reordered by sales, stock, tags, and featured product rotation. ## Key details - Advanced Sort is used for Shopify collection product sorting, grouping, shuffling, or rotation. - Advanced Sort can sort products using inventory, discounts, tags, selected metafields, weekly sales, monthly sales, growth trends, and aging inventory. - Advanced Sort can push sold-out products down. - Advanced Sort can promote discounted products. - Advanced Sort can prioritize new products for a custom number of days. - Advanced Sort can group products by tags. - Advanced Sort can shuffle all products or only the top products. - Advanced Sort can rotate featured products. - Advanced Sort can be used at the collection level or applied temporarily through a Campaign. - Sales-based sorting depends on synced sales data. --- # Campaigns Source: https://planera-shopify.ramiapps.com/campaigns.html # Campaigns Campaigns are for collection changes that need timing. In Planera, a Campaign can be a Calendar Campaign or a Schedule. Think about the work that usually happens around a sale, a launch, a seasonal moment, or a merchandising push. Smart collection conditions might need to be added, removed, or replaced for a while. A sort order might need to shift during a promo window, then go back later. A collection title might need a temporary suffix. Campaigns are built for that kind of work. Instead of treating each change as a separate reminder, you can prepare the update in Planera and attach timing to it. For a growing store, the value is not only convenience. Some merchandising ideas are simply hard to run by hand: overnight changes, recurring weekly updates, short promo windows, or different collection behavior at different hours of the day. Planera makes those patterns practical without asking a person to be available at every exact moment. ## When to use Campaigns Use Campaigns when a collection needs to change for a specific moment. Good examples: - A smart collection that needs temporary conditions added, removed, or overwritten. - A manual collection that needs a different sort order for a launch. - A recurring daily or weekday merchandising update. - A one-time update that should apply once and stay applied. - A Hybrid Collection that should use a different rule set during a promo window. - A sale collection that should add a temporary title suffix during the promotion. Campaigns are especially helpful when the timing matters. If a change should happen at a particular date, time, or repeating window, it probably belongs in a Campaign. ## Why this matters Merchandising changes often have a short shelf life. A sale collection should look different during the sale, not three days later. A launch collection should be ready when traffic arrives, not after someone remembers to update it. Campaigns let you prepare that work ahead of time, then have Planera handle the timing. In practice, that can feel like getting more usable hours in the day: not because there is less merchandising to do, but because more of it can happen reliably outside the moments when a human is sitting at the keyboard. ## How Campaigns work A Campaign has two main parts: the collection change and the timing. The collection change says what Planera should apply. That might be smart collection conditions, Hybrid rules, sort order, a more thoughtful product order generated by Advanced Sort, or title text. The timing says when the change should happen. In Planera, the two public Campaign types are Calendar Campaign and Schedule: - Calendar Campaigns happen on a specific date/time. They can have an end date/time or start only. - Schedules repeat daily or on selected weekdays inside a daily time window, with a start and end time. Calendar Campaigns with an end date/time and Schedules with an end time are usually the ones where Planera restores the relevant collection state afterward. Start-only Calendar Campaigns are better understood as applying a change and leaving it in place. ## Practical examples - Use a Calendar Campaign to change an "actual this season" collection from coats to t-shirts on April 15. - Remove a condition such as tag is not on-sale during a discount window, then add it back afterward. - Add a condition such as tag equals weekend-sale and add the title suffix - Weekend Sale every Saturday and Sunday. - Switch a Hybrid Collection to a more aggressive "best performers this week" rule set during a promotion. - Run a Schedule that shows night-time products from 6 PM to 6 AM every day. ## The basic plan 1. Pick the collection you want to update. 2. Choose the change you want Planera to apply. 3. Choose a Calendar Campaign for a dated event, or a Schedule for daily/weekday time windows. ## What to expect Planera tries to protect the collection state it changes. When a Calendar Campaign or Schedule has an end, Planera can capture the relevant original state and restore it afterward. If two Campaigns target the same collection at overlapping times, Planera may show a warning. That warning is there to help you avoid confusing results. The safest overlap is a smaller Campaign fully contained inside a parent update, with both its start and end inside the parent Campaign's start and end date/time. ## Five Schedule ideas Use Schedules when the same collection should behave differently depending on time of day, day of week, customer intent, or selling rules. ### After-work impulse buys Show "desk escape" products from 5 PM to 10 PM every weekday. Example products: snacks, candles, bath products, wine glasses, gaming accessories, cozy clothes. Why it works: after work, shoppers are often in a different mood. They browse for comfort, entertainment, and small rewards. ### Lunch-break deals Push quick-purchase products to the top from 11 AM to 2 PM daily. Example products: office snacks, ready meals, coffee gear, small gifts, low-price accessories. Why it works: lunch breaks are a natural window for quick browsing and simple buying decisions. ### Weekend party mode From Friday 4 PM to Sunday evening, promote party, hosting, and going-out products. Example products: cocktail mixers, outfits, makeup, speakers, disposable tableware, games. Why it works: weekend shoppers often have different intent than weekday shoppers, so the same collection can shift into a more social, event-ready mode. ### School-morning emergency collection Show forgotten essentials from 6 AM to 9 AM on school days. Example products: lunch boxes, uniforms, stationery, water bottles, socks, hair ties. Why it works: parents often need practical items at very specific moments, and a timed collection can make those products easier to find. ### Legal selling window / compliance merchandising Promote restricted products only during allowed windows, then automatically hide or demote them outside that time. Example products: alcohol where allowed, age-sensitive offers, local delivery-only products, pickup-window items. Why it works: some products should only be promoted during specific hours because of laws, delivery operations, or store policy. ## Five Calendar Campaign ideas Calendar Campaigns work best when shoppers already have a reason to buy: holidays, deadlines, seasonal moments, or cultural events. Planera can temporarily reshape the collection, then restore it when the moment passes. ### Halloween last-minute costumes Run a Campaign during the final week of October that pushes costumes, makeup, decorations, candy, and party items to the top. Why it works: Halloween shopping often happens late, and people need quick, obvious choices. ### Christmas gift panic mode Run a Campaign from mid-December until the shipping cutoff that highlights ready-to-ship gifts. Why it works: shoppers stop browsing nice ideas and start looking for gifts that can still arrive on time. ### Black Friday early access Run a Campaign a few days before Black Friday that promotes early-deal products or VIP picks. Why it works: shoppers are already hunting before the official sale starts. ### Valentine's Day gift rescue Run a Campaign during the week before Valentine's Day that promotes gifts by relationship or price range. Why it works: many shoppers need help choosing quickly, especially close to the date. ### New Year reset collection Run a Campaign from late December into early January that promotes fitness, planners, storage, wellness, skincare, learning, and productivity products. Why it works: shoppers are in fresh-start mode and open to buying things that support new routines. ## Image placeholder Suggested image path: ./assets/campaign-editor-overview.png Alt text: Campaign editor showing collection selection, timing, and update sections. Capture or design idea: Use a product screenshot of the Campaign editor with the collection preview, timing controls, and update sections visible. Avoid test data that looks fake or messy. ## Key details - Campaigns are planned collection updates that run at a specific time or on a recurring schedule. - Campaigns can be Calendar Campaigns or Schedules. - Calendar Campaigns happen on a specific date/time and may have an end date/time. - Schedules repeat daily or on selected weekdays inside a daily time window. - Campaigns can apply smart collection condition updates, Hybrid rule updates, sort/order changes, and collection title updates. - Smart collection condition updates can add conditions, remove conditions, or overwrite the full condition set. - Calendar Campaigns and Schedules with an end should restore the relevant collection state afterward. - Overlap warnings are guidance, not hard blocking. The clearest safe case is a smaller Campaign fully contained inside a parent Campaign's start and end date/time. - Use Calendar Campaign for dated events and Schedule for daily/weekday recurring time windows. --- # Hybrid Collections Source: https://planera-shopify.ramiapps.com/hybrid-collections.html # Hybrid Collections Planera Hybrid Collections are for the moments when Shopify's built-in collection rules are not quite enough. You keep the flexibility of a manual Shopify collection, but Planera helps decide which products belong there based on your rules. Weekly sales, monthly sales, growth trends, gross profit, ABC class, restock date, tag sets, metafields, thresholds, and grouped AND/OR conditions can all become part of how a collection is built. Think of it as a manual collection whose product list can be refreshed from Planera rules. That makes Hybrid useful when Shopify smart collections are too limited, but rebuilding product groups by hand is not a good use of time. ## When to use Hybrid Collections Use Hybrid Collections when you want Planera to help manage which products belong in a manual collection. Good examples: - A weekly best-performers collection based on recent sales. - A rising-products collection based on growth trends, not just total sales. - A restocked-and-selling collection for products restocked recently and already getting new sales. - A high-margin collection built from gross profit, stock status, and selected tags. - A collection that combines several rule groups, such as "all of these performance rules" plus "any of these tag sets." - A collection that Shopify smart collection rules cannot express cleanly. Hybrid Collections are not a replacement for every manual collection. They are best when the products in the collection should follow rules and be refreshed by Planera. ## How Hybrid Collections work Hybrid works on top of Shopify manual collections. You define rules in Planera. When you sync the collection, Planera finds matching products from synced catalog data and updates the product list in the Shopify manual collection. Planera is designed to keep Hybrid Collections in sync efficiently, including larger collections where unnecessary product changes would slow things down or create extra Shopify work. This gives you more control than a standard smart collection while still keeping the collection inside Shopify. ## How to set it up 1. Go to Collections and open the manual collection you want Planera to manage. 2. Enable Hybrid for that collection. 3. Build the rules with concrete thresholds and groups. For example: products must be in stock, revenue in the last 30 days must be greater than a chosen amount, sales growth in the last 7 days must be positive, and tag must be one of premium, new, or editor-pick. 4. Add optional limits when the collection should only contain the strongest matches, such as the top 48 products sorted by 30-day revenue, 7-day growth, gross profit, restock date, or a selected metafield. 5. Review the matching products so the collection looks right before applying it. 6. Sync the collection so Planera can update Shopify with the generated product list. After that, Planera can refresh the collection at the app's configured sync time, once or multiple times per day depending on the plan and settings. ## What to expect Because Planera manages the products in a Hybrid Collection, manual product edits made directly in Shopify may be overwritten the next time Planera syncs that collection. That is expected behavior. Hybrid means Planera is responsible for deciding which products belong in the collection based on the rules you saved. If you want to hand-manage the product list in Shopify, keep the collection as a regular manual collection instead of using Hybrid. The first time Hybrid rules are applied to a manual collection, Planera stores the collection's existing product list as a short-term safety backup when there are products to save. This gives you a fallback if you enable Hybrid and then decide the original manual product list was better. ## Image placeholder Suggested image path: ./assets/hybrid-collection-rules-to-products.png Alt text: Hybrid Collection rules generating a product list for a manual Shopify collection. Capture or design idea: Show rules on the left, matching product cards in the middle, and a Shopify manual collection on the right. The visual should make it clear that Planera decides which products belong in the collection from rules. ## Key details - Hybrid Collections are Planera-managed Shopify manual collections. - Hybrid is a final product term in Planera. - Hybrid does not apply to Shopify smart collections. - Hybrid uses rules based on synced product data, including signals such as weekly sales, monthly sales, growth trends, gross profit, ABC class, restock date, tag sets, and metafields. - Hybrid supports grouped AND/OR style condition logic. - Hybrid supports thresholds, tag "is one of" and "is not one of" rules, and optional top-N limits sorted by a selected field. - Clicking Sync applies the latest Hybrid rules to the collection. - Daily sync can also refresh Hybrid Collections. - Planera stores a short-term safety backup of the manual collection's product list the first time Hybrid rules are applied, when there are products to save. - Manual product edits made directly in Shopify may be overwritten by the next Hybrid sync. - Use a regular manual collection when the merchant wants to manage the product list by hand. --- # Choosing a Plan Source: https://planera-shopify.ramiapps.com/choosing-a-plan.html # Choosing a Plan Planera plans are mostly about how much merchandising automation your store needs. The right plan is usually not about the number of products in your store alone. It is about how many collections you want Planera to actively manage, how many campaigns you run, and how large the collections are when Advanced Sort needs to process them. If you are just starting, choose the smallest plan that covers the collections you actually want to automate now. You can move up when more collections need Advanced Sort, Hybrid rules, or larger product limits. ## The main thing to understand: managed collections A managed collection is a collection where Planera is doing ongoing merchandising work. A collection counts as managed if either of these is enabled: - Advanced Sort - Hybrid mode for manual collections If both Advanced Sort and Hybrid are enabled on the same collection, it still counts as one managed collection. Campaigns are different: they can be applied to any supported collection, even if that collection is not managed with Advanced Sort or Hybrid. That means the question is not "how many products do I have?" first. The better first question is: > How many collections do I want Planera to actively manage? ## How to choose Start by listing the collections where automation would actually save work or improve merchandising. Good candidates: - Collections where product order should change often. - Collections that need richer product-selection rules than Shopify smart collections provide. - Collections where sold-out or discounted products need special handling. - Collections where weekly or monthly sales should influence product order. - Collections used for regular launches, promos, or seasonal updates. Then count how many of those collections need Advanced Sort or Hybrid. That number is your managed collection need. ## Plan limits to compare Current public plan limits: | Limit | Starter | Scale | Enterprise | | --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | | Managed collections | 20 | 100 | 300 | | Active campaigns | 40 | 200 | 400 | | Advanced Sort product limit per collection | 1,000 | 10,000 | 25,000 | Use these as practical fit checks: - Choose Starter if you want to automate a focused set of important collections. - Choose Scale if merchandising automation is part of regular weekly work across many collections. - Choose Enterprise if you have a larger catalog, more managed collections, or collections with much higher product counts. ## What counts toward active campaigns Active campaigns are campaigns that are waiting to run or currently running. Open-ended applied changes, old completed campaigns, and paused campaigns may still exist in your account, but the active campaign limit is about upcoming and currently active work. Campaigns can be applied to any supported collection. The collection does not need to count as managed unless Advanced Sort or Hybrid is enabled for it. The campaign limits are generous for normal use. Even Starter can be a useful plan for running Campaigns, especially if you are testing Planera on a focused set of collections. A good approach is to start small, see where automation genuinely helps, and upgrade when more collections or campaigns become part of your regular merchandising work. ## Product limits for Advanced Sort Advanced Sort needs to read and apply product order inside a collection. The product limit is per collection. For example, if a plan includes Advanced Sort for up to 10,000 products per collection, Planera is designed to process collections up to that size reliably. Larger collections may still run, but results outside the plan limit are not something Planera can promise as stable. If your store has a few very large collections, this limit may matter more than the total number of collections. ## Key details - A managed collection is any collection with Advanced Sort or Hybrid enabled. - A collection with both Advanced Sort and Hybrid enabled counts as one managed collection. - Campaigns can be applied to supported collections even when they are not managed collections. - Managed collection limits are currently Starter 20, Scale 100, Enterprise 300. - Active campaign limits are currently Starter 40, Scale 200, Enterprise 400. - Advanced Sort product limits per collection are currently Starter 1,000, Scale 10,000, Enterprise 25,000. - Choose a plan based on managed collections, active campaign volume, and product count per Advanced Sort collection. - Plan details may change; use the in-app Plans page as the final source for current pricing and plan availability.