Why We Published Our Scoring Methodology

Most product research tools give you a score and say "trust us." You get a number — maybe 85 out of 100 — but no idea what went into it. Is it based on reviews? Sales rank? Price drops? Some secret sauce? You can't tell.

We think that's backwards. If you're making business decisions based on a score, you deserve to know what the score actually measures.

The Black Box Problem

When a tool hides its scoring logic, two things happen:

1. You can't improve your judgment. If you don't know why a product scored 90, you can't learn to spot winners on your own. The tool becomes a crutch, not a teacher.
2. You can't catch mistakes. Every scoring model has blind spots. If the model overweights price drops for a category where price volatility is normal (electronics, for example), you'd never know — unless you can see the weights.

What We Published

Our methodology page shows exactly how Shimm scores every product:

• 7 dimensions — Price Quality, Demand Velocity, Conversion Confidence, Earning Potential, Market Position, Risk Profile, Timing Signal
• Exact weights — Price Quality gets 25%, Timing Signal gets 5%. You know what matters most.
• Data sources — Keepa, PA-API, Google Shopping, Reddit, Google Trends. No mystery data.
• The formula — Confidence-weighted composite. Not a proprietary black box.
• Category adjustments — 500 reviews means different things in Electronics vs. Gardening. We show the thresholds.

Won't Competitors Copy This?

Maybe. But our advantage isn't the formula — it's the data flywheel. Every time a user triages a product, that feedback improves personalization. Every sales CSV upload sharpens the correlation between scores and real earnings. The methodology is public. The data network behind it is ours.

And frankly, if publishing our methodology forces competitors to be more transparent too, that's good for creators. The whole market gets better.

What This Means For You

When you see a Shimm score, you can drill into the 7-dimension breakdown and understand exactly why. If a product scores 45, you'll see that Price Quality is strong but Demand Velocity is weak. You can make an informed decision: maybe you know something about that category that the model doesn't.

That's the difference between a tool that thinks for you and a tool that thinks with you.

Read the full methodology →