Think back to the first purchase you made for one of your hobbies. Often you weren't quite into the hobby yet but felt like that purchase would be useful.
Fast-forward to the present and there's a good chance you've made more purchases to support your hobby. Likely, many purchases.
That first purchase was likely a gateway product. Once you bought it you became more likely to buy again, from there or another store.
Sometimes these gateway products aren't your best sellers. They are solid sellers but they lead customers to buy other products and go deeper into your product catalog.
This makes gateway products difficult to find in regular product reports. Often you'll hear about them from talking to customers but that's not reliable or scalable.
What you can do is to look at customer behavior after the gateway product purchase. Compare how those customers behaved when compared to customers who bought the other products.
That's the point of the Nth Product Analysis in Repeat Customer Insights. Originally it only looked for gateway products in the first order, but now it can find them in the first 10 orders for a customer.
By using that analysis, all you have to do is look for the products with the highest Average LTV. Those are your gateway products.
Eric Davis
How do your products determine customer behavior
In Repeat Customer Insights the Customer First Product analysis will measure customer behavior based on the products each customer first ordered.