order the products in a content module

in Products/Categories, each category is ordered correctly under the "Order" field.
in Products/Products, under each category and subcategory the products are ordered correctly.

The content modules can successfully apply the "ordering field" to work for product_id or product_name but not the "ordering" field which is the one that is needed. The products seem to be in a random order.

It works fine for us. The "ordering" columns is actually the default value for the ordering of products and categories listing modules and menus.
If you don't get the products ordered properly, it's probably because of something else like the "random" option of your module being turned on.

Here are my settings:

First image: the order of the categories. "Cribs" is first.
Second image: the order of the products inside "Cribs", it is a full crib, a compact crib, and a mattress. The mattress is a new item that was added.
Third image: the content module set to order by productid.
Fourth image: the display of the content module, which successfully orders the products by productid, but mattress needs to be displayed after compact crib, so change to order by ordering.
Fifth image: the content module set to order by ordering.
Sixth image: the display of the content module, which seems random.

Hi,

You're displaying products from different categories on your listing.
If you look at the ordering of your products, you will have in the different categories several products with the ordering 1, 2 3, etc as the ordering is done per category.
So when you order the products per the "ordering" field and that you have several categories of products being displayed, you will get an ordering of products which seems random since the products will be ordered per their ordering field and that several products will have the same ordering.

thank you, that makes complete sense!