There’s a simple user interface tweak that many top Shopify sellers and e-commerce sites use to increase sales on specific products. It’s easy to miss, yet implementing it can dramatically improve the visibility of higher-margin or overstocked items. Knowing about this tweak also makes it easy to understand which items your competition is actually selling the most of.

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It’s as straightforward as creating a custom-made “Best Seller” product collection and making it more visible than the existing default sorting options. Instead of leaving it up to the customer to display all products and then sort by “best selling”, a Shopify store creator can place a more desirable selection of items front and center.

There’s an easy way to check whether a Shopify store is doing this: simply add “/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling&page=1” to the end of the homepage URL. For most stores, this will take you directly to a best seller ranking of all products, even if such a page is normally unavailable in the site navigation. Compare what you see here to the “Best Seller” product category on the site.

How to Spy On Your Competitor’s Shopify Store

Hayk from Logic Inbound has created this helpful video to demonstrate how to do this yourself to figure out the best selling products online. This video also shows how to prevent others from snooping around your own site. It’s a simple fix, but one that even most top Shopify stores have not implemented (for now).

For those of you who can’t watch a video right now, let’s walk through what this looks like.

Fashionnova.com has a “best seller” section built into the top navigation pane. Clicking the “Best Sellers” here leads to this page:

Using the direct navigation trick by adding “/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling&page=1” to the homepage URL takes us to the actual best sellers list, which has very little in common with the navigation tab “Best Sellers” collection. It starts like this:

There’s no option to sort at all within a displayed collection on Fashionnova.com. Without using the manual URL addition, there does not appear to be any way to see the actual best selling items. As the second most visited Shopify domain, Fashionnova probably has a good reason for doing this.

Compare what you see at that page to the “Best Seller” collection they offer in the standard navigation menu; you’ll often find they do not display the same listings.

There are a number of reasons a store could want to do this, but the most obvious one is to display higher profit margin or high inventory items. Using the simple homepage URL extension method, anyone can see the actual best seller list. This is perfect for “spying” on your competition to determine which items YOU should consider selling.

Top Shopify Stores – Updated 2018

How To Stop Competitors From Spying On Your Shopify Store

You can prevent people from using this trick on your own Shopify site with a simple code tweak. To see how, please watch the video at the beginning of this post. The script you’ll want to use is:

<script>
 var pathname =  window.location.href;
 if((pathname.indexOf(“sort_by=best-selling”) != -1) || (pathname.indexOf(“sort_by=created-descending”) != -1) || (pathname.indexOf(“sort_by=created-ascending”) != -1)){
   window.location.href = [location.protocol, ‘//’, location.host, location.pathname].join(”);
 }
</script>

Think about how you could apply this knowledge to your own Shopify store. How will knowing which items are actually selling for your competition change your own store? Are you okay with others seeing your true best sellers? Be sure to remember the “/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling&page=1” trick for when you’re doing research on the competition in the future! In many cases, the information you need is out there right beneath the surface.

Need to build your e-commerce business? Having trouble with organic search visibility or converting visitors into customers? Logic Inbound is an SEO and web design marketing agency with e-commerce expertise that can help drive real sales with unmatched ROI. Fill out our discovery form and find out what we can do for your business.

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