How ranking works

For each brand we ask Shopify’s catalog for up to 40 of its products and take the best-rated one with at least 100 reviews.

Brands are ordered by that product’s star rating, highest first. A tie goes to the product with more reviews.

A brand with no product at 100 reviews in what came back goes after the rest, in name order.

The order is worked out each time the page opens, so it moves when the shops’ ratings do. No brand paid to be on a list or to move up one.

Which brands are on a list is our choice, and each list shows the date it was made. Every brand on one was checked against Shopify’s catalog on the date in our records.

106 shops, chosen by us and each confirmed in Shopify’s Global Catalog by its shop id. Their category and style labels are ours, and every page that shows them says so. No shop paid to be here.

Prices, ratings and stock are never kept: every figure is read from the catalog when the page opens, and says it is from “what the catalog returned”, because the catalog answers with a sample of a shop’s products and not its whole shelf.

Match compares a brand’s labels with a brand you picked. Half of it is the same category. The other half is how many style labels they share out of all the labels either one has. Two brands in the same category with the same styles match 100%; different categories with no style in common match 0%. A brand shows under Brands like yours from 50%.

It is a comparison of our labels, and only that. It says nothing about quality.

From the rating and the number of reviews on the shop’s own listing:

• Strong reviews: 4.5 stars or more from 500 or more reviews
• Good reviews: 4 stars or more from 50 or more reviews
• Few reviews yet: fewer than 50 reviews, whatever the stars
• Mixed reviews: anything else

Every card that is recommended to you says why it is there, and the reason names only something you can check: a brand you picked, the product the catalog’s own “like” search started from, our labels (said to be ours), the words you typed, or which of your search words are in the title.

Shopify marks some catalog fields as inferred, such as material, style and features worked out from a listing, and says they vary in accuracy. No reason on Ask Around cites one of them.

The catalog’s like search mostly finds the same product sold by other stores. A result carrying the picked brand’s name, or sharing half the words of the product’s title, is left out, so a like is a different product.

From the catalog’s ships-from filter, asked once per country for United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Denmark. Shopify’s docs say a product that needs no shipping can match any country, and gift cards and classes did, so products titled as gift cards, classes, courses, memberships or subscriptions do not count towards a country.

A price, who it is for, where it ships from, a category and our style words are read out of what you type and shown as chips under the search. Each chip can be taken off, and a search with nothing to read runs exactly as typed. The result count is Shopify’s own estimate and is shown as “about”.