How to Find Hidden Best Selling Products on Any Shopify Store

When starting a dropshipping store or launching a new product line, you want to focus on items that have already proven to sell. Inspecting successful Shopify competitors in your niche is a great way to source product ideas. While most store owners hide their sales dashboards, Shopify's underlying architecture has a built-in sorting method that exposes their top-performing catalog items.

In this guide, we'll explain how to find the hidden best-selling products on any Shopify store using a simple URL parameters hack.

The Shopify Best-Selling Collection Hack

By default, Shopify creates a system collection that contains every product in the store. By applying a specific sorting query parameter to the URL, you force Shopify to organize the collection by sales volume. Here is how to do it:

1. Go to the homepage of the target competitor (e.g. `https://competitor-store.com`).
2. In your browser's address bar, append `/collections/all` to the root domain. This opens the store's default catalog containing all products.
3. Now, append `?sort_by=best-selling` to the end of the URL. The final URL should look like this:
   `https://competitor-store.com/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling`
4. Press Enter.

The collection will reload. The products will now be organized in order of sales volume, with their all-time top-selling product displaying as the first item in the grid, followed by the second best-seller, and so on!

How to Export This Best-Seller List

Once you load the sorted best-seller collection page:

• Open the Shopify Product Exporter Chrome extension.
• Click Download Products. The extension will extract all product data in the exact sorted order displayed on your screen.
• Save the catalog as an Excel or CSV file. The top rows in your sheet now represent their absolute best-performing products, giving you a ready-made sourcing checklist for your supplier research!

Why This Information is Crucial

Identifying competitor best-sellers allows you to:

• Reduce Sourcing Risk: Avoid wasting money testing products that aren't generating interest. Focus your marketing budget on items with proven demand.
• Optimize Advertising: Create ads for products similar to your competitor's best-sellers, as they are already converting well.
• Analyze Upsell Potential: Notice if their best-selling products are accessories or standalone items, and plan bundles or upsells accordingly.

Conclusion

With a simple URL tweak, you can uncover key competitor sales data. Combined with Shopify Product Exporter, you can download and format these best-seller lists instantly, accelerating your product validation process.

Example Analysis Sheet

For How to Find Hidden Best Selling Products on Any Shopify Store, create a sheet with product handle, title, type, tags, vendor, price, compare-at price, variant count, image count, and notes. Add a column for the action you might take: improve your description, test a bundle, adjust collection structure, review pricing, or ignore the item. This keeps research tied to decisions.

FAQ

How do I avoid overreacting to one competitor? Compare several stores and repeat the export later. A pattern across stores is more useful than one unusual catalog snapshot.

What should I do with the findings? Turn them into original improvements for your own catalog, such as clearer product pages, better variant naming, or stronger collection organization.

Next Steps

To put How to Find Hidden Best Selling Products on Any Shopify Store into practice, start with one focused Shopify store and one clearly defined question. For example, decide whether you are checking prices, validating product ideas, preparing a migration, or cleaning catalog data. Export the catalog, review the fields that matter to that question, and write down the decision you will make from the result.

After the first pass, repeat the same workflow on a second store or a later snapshot. Comparing two clean exports is usually more useful than collecting a large amount of messy data. Keep your spreadsheet simple, document the filters you used, and save the raw export separately so your analysis can be checked or repeated later.