How the chart is ranked

StorkScout is the Billboard Hot 100 for independent baby brands. One rule decides the ranking: the products parents bought the most this week chart highest. Not sponsored placements, not affiliate priority, not an editor's shortlist.

The signal

Shops don't publish weekly sales numbers, but reviews follow purchases: a slice of every week's buyers comes back and leaves one. So we snapshot every product's review count each week, and the difference is the score. A product that earned 40 new reviews this week outranks one that earned 12, no matter how famous either was last year. Counts are normalized to a 7 day rate so weeks compare cleanly, and that number is stored on every chart entry, so any rank can be audited.

Eligibility

• Sold by an independent Shopify merchant discoverable through the Shopify Global Catalog.
• In stock, purchasable, with a real product page and a product photo.
• At least one new review this week. No new reviews, no chart position.
• A quality floor, not a ranking factor: a 4.2+ star rating across at least 10 all-time reviews.
• Priced between $5 and $500.
• Passes the safety exclusion list (below).
• New products need one full baseline week of review tracking, so a product debuts the week after we first see it.

Ties

When two products earn the same velocity, ties break in disclosed order: raw new reviews, then star rating, then all-time review count, then title A to Z. Nothing editorial sits between the data and the rank.

Diversity caps

A single shop caps at 2 positions per week and a single category at 15, applied in rank order. Without caps, one viral shop or one runaway category could own half the chart and it would stop being a picture of the whole independent baby internet.

What we never do

• Rank anything on the safety exclusion list: car seats and bases, inclined sleepers, crib bumpers, sleep positioners, weighted swaddles and sleep sacks, baby walkers, formula, medication.
• Accept paid placement or "featured" upsells. The chart is the chart, never sponsored.
• Sell parent data. Search history is used to improve rankings, nothing more.

Honest limitations

• Reviews lag purchases by a few days, so the chart reads demand with a short delay.
• Only shoppers who review are counted. That undercounts everything, roughly evenly.
• If a platform removes reviews, we clamp the change at zero rather than charting negative demand.
• If fewer than 100 products clear the bar in a sparse week, the chart runs shorter. We don't pad it.

Cadence

The catalog syncs Sunday 03:00 ET and the chart builds right after, comparing against the prior week's snapshot. Each issue lives at its own permanent URL. If we ever correct an issue, it is republished under the same week with the change noted here.