Your collections have been in the same order for years. Nobody knows if that order sells anything, so nobody touches it. One reviewer of Bestsellers reSort put the problem in one line: “Shopify only seems to show all time sales which isn’t really current.” Another had automated 100+ collections and was “looking forward to seeing the long term effects of better merchandised collections” – she wanted to measure it and did not yet know how.

Shopify does not answer the question for you. Best selling ranks products by the all-time number of orders that include the product [Source: Shopify Help Center, collection layout]. Since April 2026 new collections default to Most relevant, “based on sales performance”, and Shopify does not say which sales or over what period [Source: Shopify Changelog, 15 April 2026]. Neither order comes with a report that says whether it earned anything.

This article shows how to answer the question with the reports you already have: which pages to compare, which numbers to read, how long to wait, and what a sorting app can and cannot tell you.

Why Best selling does not tell you what sells now

A product that sold 400 units in 2022 and 3 this year still outranks a product that sold 90 this month. Best selling counts orders since the product was created, so the top of the collection settles and stays there. New products start at zero and have to climb past years of history. Sold-out products keep their rank until you remove them by hand.

Most relevant is different, and undocumented. The Help Center says it sorts “based on sales performance” and that new collections use it by default. It does not say whether that is last week or last year, or whether every visitor sees the same order. If your collections changed order this spring without anyone touching them, this is why. You cannot measure an order you cannot describe, so the first step is to know which order each collection is on – open the collection in Shopify Admin and read the Sort dropdown.

Pick the pages and the numbers to compare

Start with the collections that get traffic. In Shopify Analytics, the Sessions by landing page report “displays which page sessions on your store users start on” [Source: Shopify Help Center, behavior reports]. Filter it to URLs containing /collections/ and take the top five to ten. A change on a collection with 40 sessions a month will never show in the numbers; a change on your Bestsellers or New In collection will.

Three numbers per collection page, per period:

  • Sessions that started on the page – from Sessions by landing page.
  • Conversion rate of those sessions – Shopify’s Conversion rate over time is store-wide, not per page. For conversion by landing page use the Landing page report in Google Analytics 4 (Reports → Engagement → Landing page), which gives sessions, key events and revenue per landing URL.
  • Revenue per session from that page – revenue divided by sessions, same GA4 report.

Sessions tell you whether the change affected traffic (it usually does not – sort order is not a ranking factor you can point to). Conversion and revenue per session tell you whether people who arrived bought more. Those two are the answer.

Change one thing, then compare equal periods

Write down the date you changed the sort order. Take the four weeks before it and the four weeks after it – the same length, and both free of a sale, a launch or a holiday if you can manage it. Compare the three numbers for each collection. If a promotion sits inside one period and not the other, move the window or wait.

Read the result per collection, not as a store total. A Bestsellers collection moving from 2.1% to 2.6% conversion on 8,000 sessions is a result. A store-wide conversion rate moving from 1.8% to 1.9% in the same month could be anything – ads, weather, a price change.

Be honest about what this is. It is a before-and-after comparison, not a controlled test. Shopify has no built-in way to show two orders of the same collection to two groups of visitors, and neither does Bestsellers reSort. If the after-period is better on conversion and revenue per session across most of your top collections, and nothing else changed, the sort order is the likely cause. If only one collection moved, look for another reason first.

Two more checks worth the five minutes. Where do the sales come from on the page – the first two rows or page three? Shopify does not report position, but if your top 12 products by sales in the period are the same products in the top 12 positions, the order is doing its job. And how many sold-out products sit in the first 24? Count them on the live page. Every one is a click that cannot become an order.

Why manual sorting cannot be measured

The reviewer with 100+ collections spent hours dragging products by hand before automating it. Manual order has a measurement problem before it has a time problem: it is never the same order for long. Someone moves a product for a campaign and forgets to move it back. New products land at the bottom until someone remembers them. Sold-out products stay where they were. By the time you compare two periods, the “before” order was not one order but a dozen small edits nobody wrote down.

Whatever you sort with – Shopify’s own options, a rule, or a spreadsheet and patience – the comparison only works if the order is the same for the whole period and you can say what it was. That is the case for a rule. It is rarely the case for manual sorting across dozens of collections.

What a sorting app can and cannot tell you

Bestsellers reSort sorts each enabled collection on a metric and a time window you choose: revenue, number of sales, product views from Google Analytics, gross profit, discount, inventory, publish date and others, over any window from 1 to 365 days, with 30 days as the default. Sold-out products go to the bottom, new arrivals can go to the top for a set number of days. The order is the same for every visitor and you can read the rule that produced it, which is what makes a before-and-after comparison possible.

Its reports show what changed and what is selling, not what the change earned. The App Performance Report, weekly or monthly by email, totals the last 7 or 30 days of sorts: collections sorted, products moved up as new, moved down as sold out, featured, tagged as bestsellers, and the most used sort rules. The Bestsellers Report lists top sellers over your window and can include sell-through rate; the ABC Analysis Report grades every variant on the last 28 days of sales. Those are the inputs to the comparison above. The conversion and revenue numbers still come from Shopify Analytics and GA4.

Merchants who have done this report it as an observation rather than a number. “Items that weren’t displayed properly & not selling are now selling better,” wrote one after switching to a sales-based order. That is the right claim to make: the products you sell now are the products people see first. Whether that lifted conversion on your store is what the four-week comparison tells you.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if my collection sorting is helping sales on Shopify?

Compare the same collection pages over two equal periods, before and after the sort change, on sessions, conversion rate and revenue per session. Shopify Analytics gives you sessions per landing page; conversion and revenue per landing page come from the Landing page report in Google Analytics 4. Take your top five to ten collections by sessions, use four weeks before and four weeks after, and keep promotions out of both windows. If conversion and revenue per session rose across most of those collections and nothing else changed, the sort order is the likely cause. No sorting app measures this for you – Bestsellers reSort reports what it changed on the pages, not what the change earned.

Does Shopify’s Best selling sort show what is selling now?

No. Best selling ranks products by the all-time number of orders that include the product, according to Shopify’s Help Center. A product that sold well years ago keeps its position, new products start at zero, and sold-out products stay where they are until you remove them. To sort by recent sales – the last 30 days, for example – you need a rule that uses a time window, which Shopify’s built-in orders do not offer.

What is the default sort order for a Shopify collection?

Since 15 April 2026, new collections are sorted by Most relevant, which Shopify describes as “based on sales performance”. Shopify does not document which signals or time window it uses. Collections created before that date keep the order they had. You can see and change the order for any collection in Shopify Admin under the collection’s Sort dropdown.

Measure the pages, not the app

The question was never whether sorting matters. It was whether your sorting, on your collections, earned anything this quarter. Pick the top collections, fix the order for four weeks, compare conversion and revenue per session with the four weeks before. If you want the order to follow current sales rather than all-time history, Bestsellers reSort sorts on revenue, sales or product views over a window you set – see the recipes for how stores set it up, or open the listing on the Shopify App Store. More on collection pages that sell in our online merchandising guides.