Rainbow Shops rebuilt Salesforce-level merchandising on Shopify with Layers.
From static Shopify sorting to revenue-driving collection pages
Rainbow Shops is a value fashion retailer founded in 1935 and headquartered in Brooklyn. The company operates about 1,000 stores across the US and its territories, with an ecommerce storefront that has become the largest store in its network.
The business moves quickly across women's apparel, kids' wear, shoes, and accessories. That pace makes collection sequencing more than a layout decision. For Rainbow, the order of products on a collection page directly affects what shoppers notice, how complete looks come together, and whether high-demand items get enough visibility while demand is still fresh.
I think the order you display products on a collection page can have an enormous impact on your conversion rate. - David Cost, VP of eCommerce and Digital, Rainbow Shops
Shopify needed enterprise-grade merchandising logic
Rainbow moved from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify to simplify its ecommerce stack. The migration worked operationally, but it exposed a major merchandising gap: Shopify's native sort options were too basic for the way Rainbow needed to run collection pages.
Out-of-the-box options such as price, alphabetical order, and trailing sales data could not recreate the short-term, trend-sensitive logic Rainbow had relied on in Salesforce. The team needed to surface what was hot right now, sequence matching pieces together, and let buyers override or pin products when a category needed human judgment.
Rainbow tried other tools, including SearchSpring and Algolia, but neither solved the problem cleanly. Algolia was expensive, had data synchronization issues, and made manual merchandising harder because it overrode sort order when the team tried to curate collections directly.
We weren't able to do sort-order in the way we wanted. Algolia was expensive. I thought the performance was below expectations. - David Cost
Layers rebuilt sort control inside Shopify
Layers gave Rainbow the kind of control the team had missed since leaving Salesforce. Rainbow could define how products appeared across collection pages by combining dynamic automation with manual merchandising input.
The team built a "What's Hot" sort order using 7-day, style-level sales data. Collection pages now reorder dynamically each day based on what is selling, so product visibility follows short-term shopper demand instead of static platform rules.
Layers was the first time we were able to create some customization and essentially create the same kind of sort-orders that we were used to having in Salesforce. And we could see a pretty immediate impact on the conversion rate. - David Cost
Layers also turned Rainbow's existing product tags into Sequences for matching sets and lookbooks. Products that belong together can now appear side by side on collection pages, even when one item is selling faster than another. That gives shoppers a complete outfit view without requiring the merchandising team to hand-place every matching piece.
For categories that need a merchant touch, buyers can still pin featured products or make manual adjustments without breaking the underlying dynamic sort logic.
The impact
Since launching Layers, Rainbow has rebuilt Salesforce-level merchandising on Shopify at a fraction of the cost of heavier enterprise tools. The team regained dynamic sort control, reduced redundant manual work, and added new discovery capabilities without a major integration project.
- 30% increase in conversion rate
- Daily collection-page reordering based on current demand
- 7-day style-level sales logic powering the "What's Hot" sort order
- Matching products sequenced together to support AOV and time on page
- Less reliance on expensive, hard-to-manage merchandising tools
- Faster, more data-driven merchandising workflows
- Visual search launched as a lightweight add-on to the existing Layers setup
Layers has given us back the abilities that we had in Salesforce. We can dynamically change the sort-order on all of our collection pages daily. So those collection pages look different every day. They reflect what people are buying in a fairly short time. - David Cost
Automation that keeps merchants in control
The biggest change was not automation for its own sake. Layers let Rainbow automate the repetitive work that product data already supported while preserving merchant control for moments where context matters.
Buyers can let the "What's Hot" algorithm handle fast-moving assortment changes, use Sequences to keep matching products together, and still pin or adjust products for brand, campaign, inventory, or category reasons.
Layers gives us the power to set dynamic, automated sort orders, make manual adjustments wherever needed, and do everything in between. That flexibility is incredibly powerful. - David Cost
For Rainbow Shops, Layers closed the Shopify merchandising gap without reintroducing enterprise cost or complexity. The combination of Shopify and Layers gave the team the Salesforce-style control it needed, plus a faster operating model for adapting collection pages to what shoppers want now.
The combination of Shopify and Layers gives us everything we used to have in Salesforce. - David Cost