The Shopify Best Sellers Collection URL (and How to Sort by Best Selling)

You can see any Shopify store's best sellers, including your own, by adding one parameter to a collection URL:

https://yourstore.com/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling

Swap all for any collection handle and it sorts that collection the same way. That's the whole trick. Here's what else you need to know to actually use it.

Every sort_by parameter Shopify supports

The sort_by parameter isn't limited to best-selling. Shopify's Liquid engine accepts eight values, and you can append any of them the same way:

?sort_by=manual
?sort_by=best-selling
?sort_by=title-ascending
?sort_by=title-descending
?sort_by=price-ascending
?sort_by=price-descending
?sort_by=created-ascending
?sort_by=created-descending

manual uses whatever order you set in the collection's admin. created-descending is handy for checking what a competitor just added. All eight work on any collection URL, not just /collections/all, and none of them require editing your theme.

One catch: if a collection has sorting disabled in the theme editor, the storefront won't show a dropdown for it, but the URL parameter still works. There's no setting that blocks it.

Creating a permanent best sellers collection

The URL trick is temporary. It resets the moment a customer clicks a different link. If you want a real, linkable Best Sellers page, build it as its own collection.

1. Go to Products > Collections > Create collection.
2. Set a condition broad enough to include your catalog, for example "Inventory stock is greater than 0" if you want out-of-stock items excluded automatically.
3. Under Products, set the sort order to Best selling.
4. Save, then add the collection to your navigation or homepage.

As of Shopify's July 2026 collections update, you can add hand-picked products and exclusions to this same collection instead of choosing between automated and manual. Want to protect a specific bestseller from ever dropping off, or exclude one you're discontinuing? You can layer that on top of the same automatic condition now, without maintaining two separate collections. For more on how the products around your bestsellers get organized, our category page content guide covers how much copy belongs above the grid.

How Shopify calculates "best selling" and why it may not match your gut

This is the part that most merchants get wrong. Shopify's own documentation confirms the best-selling sort is based on the all-time number of orders that include a product, not a rolling window, not units sold, and not revenue. The July 2026 collections update changed how products get included in a collection, but the sort mechanism itself, including this calculation, stayed exactly as it was.

That has two consequences worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It's all-time, not recent. A product that sold well in your first year can sit at the top of "Best Selling" for years after interest has moved on. There's no native way to limit it to the last 30 or 90 days.
• It counts orders, not quantity. A product bought once in twenty separate orders will generally outrank a product bought twenty units at once in a single order, because Shopify is counting order appearances, not the number sold.

If your store is newer, or you've had one big wholesale order skew things, this is usually why the "best selling" sort doesn't match what you'd expect from looking at your sales reports.

When to feature best sellers on the homepage

Best sellers earn a homepage slot when they double as social proof, new visitors trust what other people already bought. That's most useful for stores where the catalog is large enough that browsing feels like work, or where a handful of products genuinely carry most of the revenue.

It's less useful if your store is new (there's no order history to sort by yet) or if your bestsellers are seasonal and you don't want last quarter's hit sitting above this quarter's launch. In that case, a manually curated "Featured" collection gives you the same homepage real estate without the staleness problem. For more on how sort order and product card layout affect what actually converts once someone lands on the page, see our collection page CRO guide.

Keeping the collection accurate

Shopify's own admin now handles the basic version of this: an in-stock condition plus a best-selling sort, in one native collection. What it still doesn't do is watch it continuously so you're not the one remembering to check it, or factor in signals outside Shopify's own conditions, like what a competitor just launched or how a product is trending in the last week rather than all-time. RankCollections layers that monitoring on top of the native sort, so a best-selling collection stays accurate without you rebuilding the condition every time something changes.

Create your first 5 collections for free now.

FAQ

Does the sort_by=best-selling URL work on every Shopify store?

Yes, on any store that hasn't specifically blocked it with custom theme code, which is uncommon. It's a default Liquid capability, not an opt-in feature.

Can I hide or disable the best-selling sort?

You can remove the sort dropdown from your storefront in the theme editor, but the URL parameter still works if someone types it in directly. There's no native setting that blocks it entirely.

Does the best-selling sort update in real time?

Shopify doesn't publish an exact refresh interval, but it reflects new orders quickly, within the same day in most cases.

What's the difference between "Best Selling" and "Featured" sort?

"Best Selling" is calculated automatically from order history. "Featured" is the same thing as manual sort. You drag and drop the order yourself, and it stays fixed until you change it.