The public earnings report nobody reads
Every AliExpress listing carries a running record of its own demand: order counts, review cadence, variant activity, shipping destinations. It is the rawest demand signal in e-commerce, closer to the source than any Shopify store tracker can get, because this is where the stores themselves buy.
When a product starts moving on TikTok, the AliExpress order curve moves first, before the Shopify stores scale, before the ad libraries fill up, before the gurus make videos about it. Learning to read that curve puts you at the front of the line instead of the back.
The four shapes every curve takes
After analyzing millions of listings, nearly every order history resolves into one of four shapes. Recognizing them at a glance is the core skill.
- The Staircase: steady steps upward with plateaus. A durable evergreen product. Boring, profitable, low-risk.
- The Hockey Stick: flat for months, then a violent turn upward. A breakout in progress, the highest-upside entry if you catch it in the first bend.
- The Mountain: a full rise-peak-decline arc. Educational to study, fatal to enter late.
- The Heartbeat: seasonal spikes on a repeating cycle. Enter six weeks before the spike, exit at the top. Calendar products behave like clockwork.
Zoom out first
Always read the 24-month view before the 30-day view. A "breakout" on the monthly chart is sometimes just the left shoulder of last year’s seasonal spike.
Variant splits: the hidden second layer
Aggregate orders tell you a product sells. Variant-level orders tell you what to actually stock and advertise. A phone case listing doing 3,000 orders a month sounds great, until you see that 82% of them are one specific model and color.
Variant concentration cuts both ways. High concentration means you can simplify your store page and inventory around the winner. Wide distribution means bundle and upsell opportunities. Either way, running ads to the wrong variant is a silent margin leak most sellers never diagnose.
82%
Of orders often concentrate in 1 to 2 variants
2.3x
Average CVR lift from leading with the winning variant
24 mo
Of variant history visible on every Majorka analysis
Review cadence as a truth serum
Orders can be inflated by sellers gaming their own listings. Reviews are harder to fake at scale, and their timing is revealing. A healthy listing shows reviews arriving in a steady drumbeat that lags orders by 2 to 4 weeks, the natural delivery-then-review cycle.
- Reviews clustered in bursts with dead gaps: possible manipulation or a product that only sells when promoted.
- Review rate collapsing while orders hold: quality problems are brewing. Refund wave incoming.
- Photo reviews from multiple countries: genuine organic spread. The strongest quality signal there is.
“Orders tell you if people want it. Reviews tell you if they want it twice.”
Putting it together: a 60-second read
Here is the full sequence, in the order a practiced eye runs it: shape of the 24-month curve, steepness of the last 8 weeks, variant concentration, review cadence, and destination mix. Five looks, sixty seconds, and you know more about the product than 95% of the people about to run ads against you.
Let the software do the reading
Majorka runs this exact sequence automatically on every pasted link and compresses it into a verdict: scale it or skip it. The sixty seconds becomes thirty.
Written by
MaximusFounder of Majorka
Built Majorka after years of running his own stores and being tired of guessing. Every post here comes from real tests, real ad spend, and real mistakes he paid for so you do not have to.
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See it in Majorka4.9/5 from 1,632 sellers
Orders · 24 wks
Scale23,491
