Can anyone explain what the 'relevance' sorting option means in a product listing (commerce category) page? there's no keyword, so no relevance. I'm surprised the default sort in a commerce category isn't to show them in the order they are in for the category record.

The criteria you set up for "Search fields" in the Website setup, is what determines the relevance of the items. The relevance sorting field uses this criteria to sort the items in the product list page.

how does that work, when there is no keyword to determine one item's relevance compared to another? Let's say my first criteria in search fields is 'name - starts with exact'. How is that going to be used to rank items by relevance when the PLP has no keyword to use for that determination?

When there is no keyword or search term, the sorting for relevance gets strange. I tried on some accounts having only "Name Start With" and it doesn't get sorted alphabetically. So not sure what the criteria they use to sort by relevance when there are no search terms or keywords.

For us it seems that the items are ordered in the reverse order that are placed in the category, ie items in the bottom are displayed first

Relevance sorted descending makes a lot of sense for Searches, but no sense on the categories. I wish we could set them separately. There are some suiteideas for sorting open. 104150 is one with a few votes.

The order for our commerce categories when using the default 'relevance' sort is the same as Greg's - the reverse of the order they are in the category. How is this not considered a bug?

I'm not sure it is a bug I think it's a feature can't remember where I saw the doc but in the smt you can order them

I find it hard to believe that any product manager decided they WANTED categories to show items in reverse order...

Yea it might be a bug or the last item added should be shown first could be logic I guess 🤔 but yea probs a bug