Top Shopify Store Hack

by | Oct 12, 2017 | 0 comments

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.

Shopify - Top Pick
  • Rating 100% 100%
What we like:

  • Easy to use
  • Beautiful themes
  • Competitive pricing
  • 24/7 support
  • Huge plugin library

No credit card required.

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:

Image of FashionNova.com "Best Seller" category

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:

Image of best selling FashionNova.com items

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

NumberWeb SiteAlexa Global Rank
1colourpop.com# 2,475
2fashionnova.com# 9,249
3jeffreestarcosmetics.com# 9,750
4gymshark.com# 15,072
5funko.com# 15,609
6kith.com# 16,789
7mvmtwatches.com# 17,500
8spigen.com# 19,864
9citiesocial.com# 21,033
10unifclothing.com# 21,484

 

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.

 

Click Here to Book a Marketing Strategy Session


Ideal Length Of A Blog Post  (To Grab Position #1 in 2021)

Ideal Length Of A Blog Post (To Grab Position #1 in 2021)

For a long time, my agency never really had a clear answer to "What the ideal length for a blog post should be?". If you do research online you’ll see multiple different answers. Some of the sources even contradict each other. Other sources represent outdated...

7 Ways To Track Your SEO Performance And Drive Better Results

7 Ways To Track Your SEO Performance And Drive Better Results

Developing an effective SEO strategy involves a lot of different factors and “moving parts”. Most of the time, strategies need to be refined over time in order to achieve the best results. In order to know what to change about your strategy, you need to know which...

Best Ecommerce Platform for Your Business

Best Ecommerce Platform for Your Business

Shopify or BigCommerce? Wix or Volusion? We compare some of the most popular hosted ecommerce platforms and give our recommendation ones that provide great value to small businesses.

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Shopify Apps – Best Premium and Free Apps to Help You Expand Your eCommerce Business

Shopify comes with a powerful set of features to help you create a professional online store. But in order to truly take advantage of the platform, you need to integrate some Shopify Apps into your store. Read on to find out our picks for the best and essential apps for your Shopify store.

Why Did Facebook Start a War on Ad Blockers?

All about Facebook’s war on ad-blockers, and what it means for desktop users of the social networking behemoth.

Ideal Length Of A Blog Post (To Grab Position #1 in 2021)

For a long time, my agency never really had a clear answer to "What the ideal length for a blog post should be?". If you do research online you’ll see multiple different answers. Some of the sources even contradict each other. Other sources represent outdated...

Geofencing Guide — The Wave is Coming — How to Ride it to Success

An introduction to the exciting world of location-based advertising.

Evergreen Topics to Write About – Guide to find them for ANY Industry

Learn how to find ideas and write content that will stay relevant for years to come.

Best WooCommerce WordPress Themes in 2018

Looking for a new design for your WordPress WooCommerce store? Check out our comprehensive roundup of the best WooCommerce themes available in 2018.

WooCommerce Shortcodes – A Comprehensive Guide to Using Shortcodes

Get ready to learn how to use one of the most useful features WordPress has introduced. In this post we will be discussing WooCommerce shortcodes. You can now create unique eCommerce pages on your site, adjusting the visuals and functional arrangement like never before.

3 Email Automation Strategies That Will Save You Time and Money

Leverage the power of email to turn visitors into customers, increase sales and much much more.