Most Popular Products on BigCommerce

(00:00)
Hey you guys! Are you looking for the BigCommerce “Most Popular Products” feed on your homepage? Let’s talk about that today.
Before we get started, my name is Kal. I’m a developer on BigCommerce, as well as a store owner just like you. Let me share my screen and let’s talk about “Most Popular Products.”
(00:27)
I’m going into the code for the Cornerstone Clean theme, just to show you that when you get your store set up on Cornerstone, there are three feeds on your homepage:
Featured Products
Top Sellers
New Products
Today, we’ll talk about what BigCommerce calls “Top Sellers,” which is usually referred to as “Most Popular Products” on most websites. These three feeds are built to show up on your store.
If I click into the customizer and select the theme styles (the art palette icon), you’ll see that this is a base Cornerstone theme. I haven’t made any modifications.
(01:10)
You can see that Featured Products and New Products are shown here. But if I go to the homepage tab and scroll down to the products section, you’ll see the following settings:
Number of Featured Products: 4
Number of Most Popular Products: 4 (this is the Top Sellers feed)
Number of New Products: 4
So, if everything is set to show, why aren’t they appearing on my theme?
(01:43)
The answer is that this isn’t a live store. I haven’t sold any products here, because this is just a sandbox for demonstration. Since I haven’t sold a single product, there’s no Top Seller yet.
As soon as I sell even one item, that product would become the Top Seller and would show up in the feed. So, if you’re not seeing anything in your store’s Top Sellers feed, it’s likely because you haven’t sold any products yet.
(02:15)
If Top Sellers are appearing in your store, you can adjust the number of products shown in the settings. But keep in mind that you have no control over which products appear — it’s automatically pulling the Top Sellers, based purely on sales.
For example, if you’re selling cars but your top-selling product is a replacement doorknob, your store will show that the top seller is a doorknob. You have no control over it — it’s simply driven by sales.
(02:51)
There are pros and cons to this.
Pros: It’s automatic; you don’t have to do anything.
Cons: You don’t control which products are featured.
One alternative is to not use the Top Sellers feed at all. Instead, you can use the product set widget in the customizer to manually select products you want to feature as Top Sellers, regardless of whether they actually are. Who’s going to know?
(03:28)
In the customizer, you can choose the products you want to feature. Just pick a few and label them as “Top Sellers.” For example, I’ll select a couple of products here and call them “Top Sellers.” You can also use a text widget or my app, Page Builder Widgets, to add a heading like “Most Popular” or “Top Sellers” in an H2 format.
(04:16)
This gives you full control over which products you want to promote as Top Sellers. What matters most is driving sales, so it’s less important which products are actually top sellers — you just want to highlight the ones you think will sell.
(04:43)
Hopefully, this clears up why the Top Sellers might not be showing up in your store. And if you’re looking to control what appears, remember that you can’t control the automatic feed, but you can use the widget method instead.
Check out my Page Builder Widgets in the BigCommerce App Store for more customization options, like the heading widget I used here.
(05:08)
Leave me a comment if you’re stuck on anything! I’m making these videos to help you out. I’ve been doing this for a long time and love giving back, so feel free to reach out to me at Epic Design Labs if you need help with your store. I’d love to hear from you. See you in the next one!