To sort a Shopify collection by best selling, open the collection in your Shopify admin (Products, then Collections), scroll to the Products section, choose Best selling from the Sort dropdown, and save. Shopify then ranks products by its own sales-based logic. It works well for proven catalogs, but it systematically buries new products that have not had a chance to sell yet.
What Does Best Selling Actually Measure?
Shopify does not publish the exact formula, and you cannot configure it. The ranking reflects recent sales activity, but you do not get to choose the time window, exclude certain order types, or decide how much recency matters. Two very different businesses get the same black-box ranking. If you want control over the window and the metric, you have to compute the order yourself, which is what sales velocity sorting is for.
The Cold-Start Problem for New Products
Best selling has a built-in feedback loop. Products at the top get seen, so they sell, so they stay at the top. New products launch with zero sales, land at the bottom of the collection, get almost no impressions, and never accumulate the sales they would need to climb. The sort is measuring history, not potential.
That is fine for a dedicated Best Sellers collection, where history is the whole point. It is a real problem in your main category collections, where new arrivals need visibility to get going at all.
How Do You Fix the Blind Spots?
The practical fix is a blended order: mostly sales-driven, with a deliberate weight on product newness so fresh items start higher and then earn their long-term position from real performance. Add an inventory signal so sold-out items stop occupying the first row. Shopify’s built-in option cannot blend signals or demote out-of-stock products, but an app working through the API can recompute a weighted order on a schedule, so the collection stays accurate as sales come in.
The sort_by URL Parameter
Every Shopify collection URL accepts a sort_by parameter that reorders the page on the fly. Append ?sort_by=best-selling to any collection URL to view it ranked by sales. For example, yourstore.com/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling shows the whole catalog ordered by best sellers. The other accepted values are price-ascending, price-descending, title-ascending, title-descending, created-ascending, created-descending, and manual.
Two things to know. First, the parameter only changes the view for that visit. It does not change the collection’s saved sort order, and shoppers arriving normally still see whatever default you set in the admin. Second, it works on any Shopify store, so it doubles as a quick research trick: open a competitor’s /collections/all?sort_by=best-selling page to see what is actually selling for them.
Two related guides go deeper: building a best sellers collection that updates itself, and the collection sorting apps compared for when the built-in sort runs out of road.
Dynasort builds exactly these blended recipes. Install it from the Shopify App Store or see how it works.