WWEShop posted a page with what it says are its top-selling talent for 2024, seemingly in ranked order. (The page can be viewed here, though, it doesn’t appear to be linked prominently on the front page of the shop.)
For the second year in a row, Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns are listed as #1 and #2.
In the interest of transparency and accountability with our estimates, this is how WWE’s list compares to our method of estimating the merchandise rankings based on the items that appear highly in the apparel section of WWEShop and the talent those items are associated with.
(WWEShop also published a list like this last year. Here’s last year’s comparison against our estimates.)
For this comparison, I ran our data for the date range of January 1, 2024, through today, November 21, 2024.
I’ve color-coded the rows above so you can more easily see where each wrestler ranked in either list.
Notably, Liv Morgan and Damian Priest are in the top 10 of WWE’s own list but rank 18th and 26th, respectively, in our estimates.
I tried seeing what difference it would make attributing half of the values of the “Terror Twins” category to each of Rhea Ripley and Priest (who are the members of that team). In that case, using reverse rank value to sort these rankings, Ripley would still be at 10th in our list. Priest would move up just 26th to 19th, though, that’s still well-short of 10th place where WWE puts him.
In our top 10 but not in WWE’s top 10 are Steve Austin, WWE itself, and Bray Wyatt.
Like last year, it seems possible WWE chose not to include inactive talent like Austin and Wyatt, and didn’t include WWE-branded items possibly because, obviously, the brand isn’t a talent.
Or it’s possible that, since our data collections are merely based on the order of items on the online shop, venue merchandise sales might greatly factor into these differences.
If Pro Wrestling Tees releases a graphic like they did last year, we will do a similar comparison for PWTees and ShopAEW items.
Full explanation about the methodology we use to make our monthly estimates:
Methodology: The listings count the instances in which any of the related items appeared among the top items on the given website within the calendar month.
Reverse rank values were counted for any item that appeared in the top 50 on a given day. An item that was #1 received 50 points for that day. An item that was #2 received 49 points, and so on.
Keep in mind these rankings are merely an estimate based on those factors. We’re leaping assuming that the order of top sellers on these websites reflects sales. There may be an automated process that drives the listings to appear the way they do, however, it’s possible the order could be manually manipulated.
At least one other disadvantage of this analysis is it doesn’t give us information about the volume of actual sales generated from any of these items or wrestlers/categories. That’s an unavoidable limitation of the data available, as all we have to work with is the order of the top sellers’ listings.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.