Let’s face it - not all products are created equal. Some of your products are going to perform a lot better than others within your Shopify store. These popular products are typically referred to as best sellers.
In this post, I’ll cover Shopify best sellers including:
Shopify tracks best sellers for a store automatically behind the scenes as each new order comes in. There is no extra configuration need to enable this feature. From Shopify’s documentation, they state:
The By best selling sorting option is determined by the number of times a variant appears in orders, and not by the total number of variant units that have been sold. The variant that has appeared in the most orders will be ranked first, and the variant that has appeared in the fewest orders will be ranked last. The collection sorting is re-calculated on a weekly basis.
In other words, Shopify tracks best sellers based on the number of orders that contain each product variant, not the number of variants ordered.
Also, it is worth mentioning that Shopify tracks best sellers for all-time, which i’ll discuss in more detail below.
There are two main places you can use Shopify best sellers within your store:
Shopify collections can be sorted By best selling. This best seller sorting applies to both Custom collections (a.k.a - Manual) and Smart Collections (a.k.a - Automatic). When this option is chosen, all products within the collection will be sorted based on Shopify’s best seller tracking rank.
See also: Shopify collection sorting docs
Shopify provides different types of sales reports so you can see which products are selling the best within your store. These reports are only available on the Shopify, Advanced Shopify, or Plus plans (i.e. - not the Shopify Basic plan). Some of the product sales reports include:
See also: Shopify Sales report docs
As mentioned above, Shopify’s best seller rank is based on all-time sales.
When best sellers are tracked using all-time sales, the best seller ranks may be inaccurate and misleading.
Why is this the case? All-time sales end up skewing the sales results as follows:
If accurate best seller sales is important for your Shopify store, you have a couple of options:
In this post, we’ve covered:
If you have any questions about Shopify best sellers, let me know in the comments.