creating your own sort order - Is this possible?

I was wondering if there is anyway to use a custom sort order in ZenCart, instead of the few defaults that are offered.

my boss (at Mbare.com) would like to either:

a) have products arranged with the highest-selling first (I know that ZenCart keeps track of this data, so it seems possible. I'm comfortable with PHP/mySQL coding, if that is what it takes)

b) manually sort them. This would differ based on Product, category, etc. We have a copies of the database in .txt and Excel format. can I just manually change the sort order in the database?

Thanks in advance for your help.

You can alpha sort accending or decending, or you can assign a sort value to each item and use it - selectable in admin.

Highest sales will require added code to excecute

How do I set it to do a manual order?

We decided to just manually put a few of our top items at the top of each list. I left the sort field blank, and tried changing the sort order number to 1, 2, and 3. shouldn't this make them the first three listed? if not, how would I do that?

The auto sorts are in the admin

admin > config > layout settings > Categories/Products Display Sort Order
admin > config > product info > Previous Next - Sort Order
and others

I think what you want is to have it use your defined sort order as set when you enter the products...

You might use 10, 20, 30... instead of 1, 2, 3...

This allows inserting some between as 11, 12 etc