How We Track the Weekly Toy Sourcing Snapshot

Every week, Product Map China publishes a Toy Sourcing Signals snapshot for buyers who source toys from China. Each issue reads the same signals the same way: what moved on US retail rankings, what China's supply side is doing, and whether US search interest is moving with them. This page explains what each signal measures, what it cannot measure, and how we read them together.

What we track

• Amazon US Best Sellers and New Releases. The platform's own toy charts, 40 positions across the two lists. A chart position is visibility — what Amazon put in front of shoppers that week — not a sales count.
• Estimated Top 20s for Temu US and TikTok Shop US. Neither marketplace publishes complete sales data, so these monthly-sales tables are third-party estimates, not platform figures. Every chart we republish from them is labeled as an estimate.
• China-side supply activity. What suppliers on the China cross-border channel are listing and searching for. Sourcing searches that stay visible across both short and longer time frames read as sustained attention, not a one-day spike. This side tends to move before the retail rankings do — supply repositions first — and earlier is not the same as bigger.
• US search interest. Whether American shoppers are searching for a category at all. We use it as context, never as the lead.

How we read them

Side by side, never merged. Each source measures something different, so counts sit next to each other and are never combined into one score. Visibility in a ranking is not sales: a product can hold a chart position while selling moderately, and an estimated-sales table can swing on a single viral video. That is why single-week moves are reported as observations, not forecasts, and why we follow the same products across several weeks before calling anything a trend.

All signals are captured in the same weekly window, and the capture date is printed with every chart and product image in each issue.

What this series is not

It is not a global toy ranking, and it does not pretend the data is complete — no public source offers complete toy sales data. It is a fixed set of observations that helps buyers ask better next questions: what to look at, what is already crowded, and what to verify with a supplier before committing to an order.

Method changes

The method above has been in effect since the first issue in August 2026. If a signal is ever added, removed, or redefined, the change will be dated here.

• 2026-09-18: Page created. The wording consolidates the methodology notes already carried in each weekly issue since the series began; no signal or definition changed.