Prune your products of poor performers

This weekend I had to heavily prune and pull out some borage.

Back in March we had only a few seedlings of borage but those have exploded in growth through the start of the summer. So much so that some are pushing 4 feet tall and wide while taking over an entire bed.

This past weekend I took my pruners and knife to them, cutting and pulling out huge chunks.

While I love borage (as do the bees and birds), too much overwhelms everything else I wanted growing. I had to cut them back to make room.

Your product selection in your Shopify store is the same. While you do have infinite shelf space, customers only have limited attention. You should constantly be pruning back products, styles, and flavors that aren't doing well. Use that cleared space to promote your better performers.

How to prune back your products? Best-sellers is one common way but that can lead to a bias against new products. A better option is to look at how products entice customers to buy a second time.

This advice is even more important if you manufacture your own products. The fewer different product lines you have, the less cost to produce and manage.

To evaluate a product you'll want to compare each product's Repeat Purchase Rate against your baseline rate. Any product with a really low rate, that isn't a new (unproven) product or a best seller should be considered to be cut.

If you don't want to calculate all of those metrics for each product, Repeat Customer Insights will analyze each product to determine their popularity and customer metrics.

Even thinning a handful of products every year can be beneficial over time.

Eric Davis