How to Identify Best-Selling Products That Convert
Chances are, you’ve been getting your best sellers product list totally wrong.
We know that an eCommerce retailer's best sellers collection is one of the most critical online “shelf spaces” in your store. AKA prime online merchandising real estate on homepages and menus.
This is especially true for stores with extensive product inventories.
However, it’s not enough to just sort by units sold.
To optimize for conversions and profit, best sellers should be your best-performing products that account for inventory optimization and retail KPIs.
Conventionally, a best-seller is the product with the highest sales volume in a period, which is how Shopify's "best selling" sort and most best-seller badges define it. But volume alone is a blended signal: it reflects genuine demand together with everything that amplified it, including paid ads, influencer and PR pushes, discounting, seasonality, and merchandising placement itself. For merchandising decisions, a truer best-seller is a product that sustains strong demand relative to the exposure it received: it converts and sells through at or near full price without heavy discounting or paid support, holds up over time rather than in a single spike, and does so with healthy margins, low returns, and real repeat demand.
Bonus Content: How Inventory Optimization Affects Profitability
So, What Is the Right Way to Find These Converting Best-Selling Products?
Many stores identify their best seller products based only on sales quantity. But for long-term growth and profitability, that is simply not enough.
Instead, eCommerce retailers need to analyze their overall store revenue, sales, and inventory performance.
Example: How to Identify Your Real Best Sellers
To show you how retailers should be finding the right best-selling products to promote, let’s look at two product hypotheticals.
Product A: An online retailer pushed product A on marketing channels with a big budget, resulting in a lot of exposure. This resulted in a significant sales boost. It looked a little something like this.
- Marketing budget: $1,000
- Units sold: 100 units
- In-store conversion rate: 0.5%
- Facebook CTR: 1%
Product B: For product B, the retailer opts for a continuous average budget which results in average exposure, while still boosting sales. It looked a little something like this.
- Marketing budget: $500
- Units sold: 90 units
- In-store conversion rate: 2.5%
- Facebook CTR: 3%
Which product would you consider being the better product in terms of performance?
If you were to only consider units sold, a retailer may think product A.
But is that the real best seller?
Of course not; product B is the best seller. But that’s not the full picture.
Of course not; product Bis the best seller. But that’s not the full picture.
The Metrics That Reveal Your True Best-Sellers
Units sold is where most merchants stop, and it is exactly why their best-seller lists mislead them. The goal is to separate real demand from the support behind it, so score each product across these signals instead:
- Demand efficiency: sales relative to the ad spend, discounting, and placement a product received. A product that sells well with little promotion is a stronger winner than one propped up by both.
- Full-price sell-through: how much sells before any markdown.
- Gross profit contribution: units × margin, not revenue.
- Sell-through velocity: how fast stock clears.
- Return rate: a high-return "winner" quietly loses money.
- Repeat-purchase rate: products that bring shoppers back on their own merits.
A product that holds up across these is a genuine best-seller. One that only wins on units is usually a marketing or discounting artifact, not a durable demand signal.
What about Inventory Metrics and Product Margins?
eCommerce retailers should aim to promote the best-performing products that align with their inventory goals and KPIs.
Additionally, to boost profits along with sales, they need to take product margins into the decision-making process. This will show you which high-performing products to present and push to boost sales and profitability.
The trick to really boosting profits is combining this product-sorting approach with automation, something online jewelry retailer Swarovski (IL) have mastered.
In fact, they were able to increase profits by 8% in just four weeks by using optimized product lists.
In short, they were able to harness the power of a multi-parameter sorting strategy for all of their collections using Kimonix’s advanced product sorting.
This then enabled them to establish the influence of each parameter based on the business goal of each collection, and use advanced AI to continuously optimize their collections based on real-time data.
You can read the full case study here.
Why Shopify's "Best Selling" Sort Hides Your Real Winners
Shopify's native "Best selling" sort ranks by recent order count. It ignores margin, returns, discounting, and velocity, and it inherits whatever ads, promotions, and placement drove those orders, so it surfaces amplified products and buries quiet, high-margin winners. That is fine for a quick view, but it is the wrong sort to merchandise your store around. Multi-metric sorting lets you rank collections by profit, velocity, and full-price sell-through together, so the products at the top of every collection are the ones actually worth promoting.
Turn Your Real Best-Sellers Into More Revenue
Finding your winners only pays off if you act on them. Once you know your real best-sellers:
- Promote them where shoppers land by pinning them to the top of relevant collections with AI collection sorting.
- Attach them to related items so they lift more baskets through cross-selling on collection and product pages.
- Protect their stock so you never run your top-margin products out mid-season.
Not sure which of your collections are leading with the wrong products? Run a free Kimonix store audit to see your merchandising gaps in about 60 seconds, no install required.
Final Thoughts: How to Optimize Best Seller Lists
By identifying your real best sellers, eCommerce retailers are able to increase conversion rates while boosting overall profits.
Before updating your best sellers product sorting strategy, eCommerce brands should take note of the following:
- You will want to identify best sellers according to recent data (e.g., last 30 days) in order to have relevant products that are hot now.
- Don’t put too many products in your best seller collections, this will cause you to lose credibility.
- Best seller lists should be updated often so that retailers are showing the trendiest products at any given time.
Contact us for more info and a free demo of the only multi-parameter automated solution for Shopify.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I find my real best-sellers on Shopify?+
Rank products by demand efficiency and gross profit contribution rather than units sold, then cross-check full-price sell-through, return rate, and repeat purchases. A genuine best-seller sustains demand relative to the exposure it received, rather than spiking once because it was advertised or discounted heavily. Shopify's native best selling sort ranks on volume alone, so it will not surface this on its own.
Should best-sellers be ranked by units or profit?+
By profit contribution and demand efficiency. High-unit, low-margin products propped up by discounts or ads often earn less than quieter, high-margin ones, so a units-based list quietly fills your most valuable placement with your least profitable stock. Ranking on profit contribution also protects against products that sell in volume and come straight back as returns.
Why is sorting by units sold a bad way to pick best sellers?+
Units sold is a blended signal. It reflects genuine demand mixed with everything that amplified it: paid ads, influencer and PR pushes, discounting, seasonality, and merchandising placement itself. A product featured on your homepage sells more simply because it was featured, so promoting it again on the strength of that number creates a loop that keeps rewarding your own past promotion decisions instead of your best products.
What metrics should a best sellers collection be based on?+
Combine sales velocity with conversion rate, margin, variant-level stock, return rate, and repeat purchase data. Conversion rate separates real demand from exposure. Variant-level stock matters because a product sold out in the most common sizes is effectively unavailable to most shoppers, so featuring it wastes prime placement. Kimonix scores products across 100+ parameters including these, so the collection reflects genuine performance.
How often should I refresh my best-seller list?+
Monthly for most stores and weekly during peak seasons, since velocity, discounting, and margins shift with demand. In practice a manually refreshed list is already stale by the time it publishes, because stock and demand move daily. Automating the sort keeps the collection current continuously, and A/B testing the strategy confirms the new ordering actually earns more than the one it replaced.
The Author
Co-Founder & CEO at Kimonix
