I recently found that having worked out how to place a cateogry of products on the homepage of my Magento site I wanted to specify the order that those products were listed in. Mainly this was because I was hiding the standard Magento toolbars, so the customer could not do this themselves. The first place I started looking was the system configuration menu, see below.

This seemed like a promising place to start with the dropdown for “Product Listing Sort by”. There are three values here: Best Value, Name and Price. Name and Price are self explanatory but what exactly is “Best Value”? It simply gives the shop administrator the chance to order products manually – displaying Best Value to the customer.

So where do I manually order the products? You do this in the category itself, assuming you are [displaying products using a category][1] like I tend to. Navigate your way to the categoru, under catalogue – manage catagories, select the category that you are displaying and check the final tab “Category Products”.

Simply enter the numerical sequence into the posiiton field at the end. Once you do this make sure you save the category.

Ands thats it. Your homepage products should now be displayed in the order you want!

A word of warning! You might find, like I did, that this doesn’t work – and a common problem is that the category itself has a different order specified – you change this on the category’s Display Settings, in an option called Default Product Listing Sort By.

[1]: /2011/03/magento-putting-products-cms-page-homepage/