How to find a store's best sellers
Four ways to find the products a store sells most, from the best-selling sort on Shopify collections to product feeds, reviews and ads, and how to read each signal without fooling yourself.
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A store's best sellers are the shortest path to understanding its business. They show what customers actually buy, which price points work and which products pay for the ads. The good news is that most stores reveal their best sellers in public, sometimes on purpose and sometimes as a side effect of how their platform works. This guide covers four methods, from quickest to most thorough, and how to combine them.
Key takeaways
- On many Shopify stores, sorting a collection by best-selling shows the store's own sales ranking.
- The product feed and sitemap show what is new and what changes often, which hints at what moves.
- Review counts, ads and "only a few left" stock messages are supporting signals, not proof.
- A best-seller list gives you order, not volume. Any order counts per product from a tool are estimates.
- Check best sellers over time. A product climbing the list matters more than one sitting at the top for years.
Method 1. The best-selling sort
Shopify collections can be sorted several ways, and one of them is best-selling. Many stores leave this option public. Try the store address followed by /collections/all?sort_by=best-selling. If the store hides the "all" collection, open any real collection and add ?sort_by=best-selling to its address.
The order you see is Shopify's own ranking of the products in that collection by sales. That makes it the strongest public signal you can get. A few things to keep in mind:
- It is a ranking, not a count. You know product A outsells product B, but not by how much.
- The time window is not shown. The ranking reflects sales history, so a long-time staple can outrank a newer product that is selling faster right now.
- Stores can override it. Some stores pin products manually or hide the sort option. If the order looks identical to the default featured order, it may not be a real best-selling sort.
- Gift cards and samples can appear. Skip items that are obviously not real products.
In RivalSonar, the Store profile shows each store's products in best-seller rank order and estimates each product's share of orders. The extension panel shows the top best sellers on any store you visit.
Method 2. Read the product feed and sitemap
On Shopify, the store address followed by /products.json returns the public catalogue with the date each product was created and last updated. The sitemap at /sitemap.xml links to product sitemaps with last-modified dates.
What to look for:
- Recently created products that already rank high in the best-selling sort. These are fast movers.
- Products updated very often. Frequent changes to variants, prices or stock can mean the store is managing a product that sells.
- Price changes. A product whose compare-at price appears or changes often may be a promotion focus.
Feeds can be turned off or limited by the store. If that happens, use the collections and product pages directly.
Method 3. Use reviews and social proof carefully
Review counts on product pages are tempting, but they are weak evidence on their own. Reviews can be imported from suppliers, carried over from older listings or written by the store. Use them as a tiebreaker:
- If two products are close in the best-selling sort, the one with a faster stream of recent dated reviews is probably selling better now.
- A product with thousands of reviews and no visible ads may be a long-time staple rather than a current winner.
- Very old reviews on a brand-new product suggest imported reviews.
Method 4. Follow the ads
Stores advertise the products that make them money. Search the store's name or domain in the Meta Ad Library and the TikTok Creative Center, then list the products featured in ads that have been active the longest. If those products also rank high in the best-selling sort, you have strong agreement.
RivalSonar's Ad library links ads to the store and product where it can, and shows active days, an estimated reach and spend and an AI score of testing, scaling or winning. See how to use an ad library for product research for the full method.
Combining the signals
Score each product you find on four questions:
| Signal | Strong | Weak |
|---|---|---|
| Best-selling sort | Top 3 in the store | Below top 20 |
| Catalogue age | Added recently and already ranking | Old and static |
| Ads | Running 30 days or more | None or under a week |
| Other stores | Sold by several stores | Only this store |
A product that is strong on three or four is worth a closer look. A product strong on only one is a lead, not a conclusion.
From order to volume
A ranking tells you the order. If you want a sense of volume, you need an estimate of the store's total orders and a way to split them. RivalSonar splits a store's estimated orders across its best sellers with a power curve, so the top product takes the biggest share. That reflects how most stores work, where a handful of products carry most of the sales. The resulting per-product numbers are estimates, and their main value is comparing products across stores. The full model is in how to estimate any store's sales.
Watch the list move
A single snapshot hides the most useful information, which is change. Check the best-selling sort on the same store a week apart and note:
- products that jumped up the list
- new products that appeared in the top ten
- products that dropped out
Climbers are the ones to study. In RivalSonar, adding a store to the Sales tracker records hourly order estimates and which products sold, with a report ready after 24 hours and an email summary. That turns the best-seller list from a snapshot into a time series. See how to track competitor sales daily.
What to do with the list
Once you know a competitor's best sellers, ask:
- What price band are they in, and is there room above or below?
- What do the product pages do well, such as offers, bundles or guarantees?
- Which of these products also rank high on other stores? Those are candidates for your own research list. Our guide on finding winning products shows the next steps.
Use what you learn to make a better offer. Do not copy photos, descriptions or brand assets you do not have rights to.
