Although not ideal, I encountered a workaround today for a problem others may face and I wanted to put a post out there in case you run in to this as well.

In managing the items in the store, our customer wanted to display the items in ascending order (from smallest to largest), but fractional sizes did not follow the ascending order. Example: ideally would like to display 1/4" cable, 1/2" cable, 3/4" cable, 1" cable, 1 1/2" cable... However, the sort order displayed 1/2", 1/4" and so on.

To work around this issue, you can add leading spaces to the name of the product and this will manipulate the sorting order in your favor. The leading spaces will get trimmed off, and the sort order will display as you wish.

Not sure if this is all that clever, but thought I'd pass on what I found.