Everyone talks about picking winning products when you’re starting out, but I haven’t seen much discussion about the other side of that - actually removing products once you have enough data to know they’re not pulling their weight. I’m four months in and staring at a catalog where roughly a third of my listed items have never generated a single sale, and I’m trying to figure out a sensible way to decide what stays and what goes.
The obvious answer is “cut anything with zero sales,” but that feels too blunt. A product could have zero sales because it’s genuinely bad, or because it’s barely been shown to anyone yet, or because it’s aimed at a slightly different buyer than the rest of my catalog and just hasn’t found its audience within the ad system’s current targeting.
So a few specific questions for anyone who’s actually gone through this:
What’s the minimum amount of traffic or time you’d give a product before writing it off completely? Do you remove underperformers all at once or phase them out gradually to avoid disrupting whatever the ad system has already learned? And has cutting dead weight ever measurably improved your numbers on the remaining products, or does it mostly just tidy up the dashboard without changing much?
Trying to avoid either extreme here - keeping a bloated catalog out of indecision, or cutting too aggressively and losing something that just needed more time.