Helm › Helm University › Track 3 › Lesson 3.2
Lesson 3.2How listings get ranked
Five sorts, two of which you can influence, and a verified rail with a formula worth reading.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Explain each of the five sort orders and what actually drives the two that reward a seller.
Five sorts, and only five
The browse rail accepts a fixed list of sort keys and nothing else. Anything unrecognised falls back to newest, so a shopper cannot construct an ordering you have not seen.
| Sort | Orders by |
|---|---|
| Newest | When you published, then when you created it |
| Best selling | Units sold, then review count, then newest |
| Top rated | Average rating, then review count, then newest |
| Price low | Cheapest first |
| Price high | Dearest first |
What units sold actually counts
Units sold is the total quantity across orders that reached paid, shipped or delivered. A cancelled order does not count. A refunded order does not count. So the figure is real sales rather than attempted ones, and it cannot be inflated by placing orders you then cancel.
Where ratings come from
Average rating and review count come from published reviews only. Track 7 covers how reviews work and who may leave one.
A gap in the review system worth knowing
Helm has two review paths for historical reasons, and only one of them feeds the rating shown on your tiles. Reviews posted through the older product review route are stored but do not move the average or the count that shoppers see. If a review appears somewhere and your tile rating does not change, that is why, and it is a known defect rather than something you have done.
The verified rail has an actual formula
The verified shops rail on the Shop home page is the one placement on Helm with a published scoring rule, and only verified shops are eligible for it at all.
A shop's score is built from its order count weighted heavily, its product views weighted lightly, and its review count. Holding Official Brand verification adds a small bonus. Then one much larger factor: if the shopper looking at the rail has previously bought in a category you sell in, you get a substantial boost for that shopper specifically.
Finally a deliberate shuffle. A rotating value derived from your shop and the current six hour window nudges the order, so the rail is not identical all day and shops below the top few still get seen.
orders x 3, plus views x 0.1, plus reviews x 2, plus a category match bonus, plus a six hourly shuffle.
What this tells you to do
Nothing on Helm can be bought to the top. There is no ad auction and no promoted placement, so the levers are real ones: get verified, sell in a category rather than scattered across many, and accumulate genuine reviews. The six hour rotation means a quiet shop is not permanently buried.