Related products: sort criteria (...random?) and limit

[salcapolupo]

Hello, I tried to find a response to this question, but can't get a really clear one anywhere.

I'm getting in touch with related products in Magento, and would like to understand what is default criteria order for related one, if they depends on theme used and if there's a standard for it.

1) I.e when I select 8 related products they are showed in which order (random, by sale, by views, ...) by default?

2) Is there a way to limit to maximum ie. 6 products from backend without coding? It would be very nice if would possibile.

Here an example on my website, where related product are too much in some cases:

http://www.store.rubbettinoeditore.it/autobiografia.html

Hope you can help me claryfing that points. Thanks in advance!

[Tom Robertshaw]

Hi, any answer is always going to be dependent on what extensions and customisations have been added to the store. 

1) By default, Magento will order related products by the value in the position column of the related products tab of a product. It will sort ascending. So no value is the same as 0, i.e. will be shown first. 

2) There isn't a way of limiting this other than removing them from being assigned as related products.

[salcapolupo]

Hello, thanks for your response. I can't figure out what sort criteria is active until now... maybe it would be related to number of sales in my website, difficult to be sure of that. Hope in someone else, thank you again :-)