Atelier – Automatic Product Sorting for WooCommerce

Automatic product sorting ranks category archives using observed net units sold, catalog availability, and which products are new arrivals.

Before the first change, the plugin shows what would move. The first Apply for a category approves the formula and policy and publishes the reviewed order.

Later candidates may publish automatically when only data changes under that approval. A formula or policy change returns to Preview. Pause stops publications; Restore returns to the native order; Rollback serves a selected earlier order until you publish again. The dashboard attributes and timestamps each change.

What it measures exactly

• Observed net units over 30 days, adjusted for refunds with an attributable quantity. It counts every order that WooCommerce exposes as paid and in an eligible status and does not automatically exclude test orders. Each run takes a complete U30 snapshot, and the population, coverage, and cutoff are visible.
• Catalog availability observed during the latest calculation. This is what the catalog reported at that moment, not a checkout reservation or a real-time promise.
• New arrivals, with a window configurable per category.

What it does not do

• It does not promise to increase sales or improve conversion. It sorts by an observed signal; what happens afterwards depends on your store.
• There is no “smart score,” AI, per-visitor personalization, or random exploration.
• It does not know real-time stock or the units actually free at checkout.
• It does not collect impressions, clicks, or sessions.

Privacy

All calculations run on your server. The plugin sends no telemetry or store data, depends on no external service, and makes no network request to sort products. WordPress itself may still check WordPress.org for updates.

Where it sorts and where it does not

The plugin sorts only when it can identify one category unambiguously.

It serves the ranking in:

• The main category archive of a classic theme when WooCommerce uses its default or manual order.
• The Product Collection block in Default/inherit mode inside the category template.
• The Product Collection block in Custom+Manual mode when the category is unambiguous and no other ordering criterion exists, including editor preview.

It keeps the native order for: an explicit order selected by the visitor, search, the main shop archive, queries spanning several categories, the Store API, external search engines, and custom SQL queries from other plugins.

Not claimed as supported: shortcodes, page builders, headless setups, WPML/Polylang, and page or CDN caches. The dashboard is ready for translation and supports RTL; multilingual catalog sorting has not been verified.

WordPress Multisite is not supported. The plugin detects it, explains the limitation, and does nothing else: no tables, no scheduled work, and no storefront intervention on any site in the network.

Development

Human-readable admin source is included in admin-ui/src/; WordPress runs the compiled files in assets/admin/. With Node 20+ and npm 10+, rebuild them with npm ci && npm run build:assets. package-lock.json pins the JavaScript toolchain. composer install --no-dev --classmap-authoritative rebuilds a functional PHP autoloader from composer.lock. The plugin already includes its production assets and autoloader, so merchants do not run either build tool.