Transparent Scores. No Black Box.
Every product earns a Quality Score from four signals the marketplace itself rewards.
We don't rank products on vibes. Each one is scored inside its own category because "value" and "sales rank" only mean something relative to direct competitors.
The four ingredients
Rating
We blend each product's rating toward the category mean until it has enough reviews to stand on its own, so a product with five perfect reviews can't leapfrog one with ten thousand.
Review volume
More reviews mean more confidence, but with diminishing returns. The jump from 100 to 1,000 matters more than 50,000 to 51,000.
Value
Bang-for-buck: adjusted rating per dollar, ranked against the direct competitors in the same category. Being good is necessary; being good for the money is what wins.
Best-seller rank
Scored on a winner-takes-more curve. What people actually buy is the hardest signal to fake.
Where humans come in
The algorithm produces the default order. Our team can flag a Staff Pick, or override a ranking when first-hand experience says the machine got it wrong. When we do, the badge makes it obvious. Every override is logged, so we can check our own work against how products actually perform over time. This keeps us honest and lets us know where our biases might be showing. We only consider products from U.S.-based sellers, and we make money through affiliate links (which never buys a better score or ranking). Read the disclosure.