Ten Products or Two Hundred

The question that changes everything

How many things are you selling.

It sounds administrative and it determines the answer to nearly every subsequent decision: how people find things, how much you write per item, whether you need search, how you handle photography, and how much of your week the shop consumes.

Advice given without knowing this number is guesswork, and most online advice assumes a scale far larger than a small business operates at.

Under twenty: write everything by hand

With a small range, the entire structure can be a menu.

Every product gets a proper page, written individually, with photography that was actually taken of that item.

Nobody needs search, because everything is two taps away. Filtering is unnecessary. Categories may not be needed at all.

The competitive advantage available here is depth: a shop with twelve products can afford three hundred words and six photographs each, which no large retailer can match on the same items.

The mistake at this size is building the infrastructure of a large shop, which adds complexity and hides a small range behind machinery.

Twenty to a hundred: structure starts to matter

The awkward middle, and where most small businesses actually sit.

A menu becomes unwieldy, so categories are needed and have to be chosen carefully rather than inherited from how your supplier organises things.

Product descriptions start to be written to a template because writing a hundred original pages is not realistic, and the template has to be good enough that it does not read like a template.

Search becomes useful rather than essential. Filtering by one or two attributes starts to earn its place.

Photography becomes a project rather than an afternoon, and consistency between shots starts to matter visually.

Above a hundred: data becomes the job

Something changes qualitatively rather than just in degree.

At this size the shop is a database with a shopfront, and the quality of the data determines whether anybody finds anything.

Every product needs consistent attributes recorded the same way, because that is what powers filtering, and a range where half the items have a size recorded and half do not cannot be filtered by size.

Search becomes essential and its quality becomes a real factor in sales.

Writing individual descriptions is no longer possible, so the work moves to structured data with generated pages, and the differentiator becomes how well the information is organised rather than how well it is written.

What changes at each threshold

• Finding things: menu, then categories, then search and filters.
• Descriptions: individually written, then templated, then generated from data.
• Photography: an afternoon, then a project, then a standardised process.
• Stock: checkable by hand, then a spreadsheet, then a system.
• Your time: occasional, then weekly, then somebody's role.

Each threshold arrives quietly, usually after the shop has been running for a while, which is why so many shops are operating with the structure of a smaller one.

A worked example

A specialist food supplier launched with eighteen products, each with a properly written page and its own photographs.

Over two years the range grew to about a hundred and sixty as they added supplier lines.

Nothing structural changed, because each addition was small. The menu grew, categories were added ad hoc, and new items got a short description copied from the supplier.

By the time anybody looked, the site had nine categories with overlapping meanings, no search, no filtering, and a mixture of original and supplier copy that read inconsistently.

Sales were concentrated almost entirely in the original eighteen products, which were the only ones anybody could find.

The fix was a restructure: four clear categories, consistent attributes recorded for every item, working search, and filtering by two attributes customers actually used.

Sales spread across the range within a quarter. Nothing was added and nothing was removed.

Growth is where it goes wrong

Almost nobody launches with the wrong structure. They grow into it.

A shop built correctly for twenty products, holding a hundred and fifty three years later, is the common case, and no single addition ever justified rethinking anything.

The useful discipline is to set a review threshold in advance. At fifty products, and again at a hundred, stop and ask whether the way people find things still works.

That takes an hour and prevents the situation where a restructure becomes a project nobody has time for.

Categories are a customer decision

The most common structural error, and it is independent of size.

Categories get inherited from how a supplier organises a catalogue, how the business thinks internally, or how the products arrive on a pallet.

None of those is how a customer thinks about what they want.

The test is whether somebody who does not work for you can predict which category an item is in without being told. If they cannot, the categories are describing your operation rather than their need.

Watching a few people look for something specific settles this faster than any amount of internal discussion.

Fewer products is a strategy

Worth saying because the assumption always runs the other way.

More products means more to photograph, describe, stock, price, update, and keep accurate, and every one of those obligations continues indefinitely.

A shop with thirty products that are all well presented, in stock, and accurately described will usually outperform the same business with two hundred, half of which are thin listings for items that rarely sell.

Removing products is a legitimate improvement, and the ones to remove are visible in your own sales data.

The counter-case

Some businesses genuinely need a large catalogue and cannot trim it.

Parts suppliers, where a customer needs one specific item and the value of the shop is that you have it.

Trade distributors whose customers order across a wide range and expect the full list.

In those cases the answer is not fewer products, it is accepting that the data quality work is the actual job, and resourcing it. A parts catalogue with poor search is worse than no catalogue, because the customer concludes you do not stock the item.

What is not defensible is a large catalogue that grew by accident, which is a different thing wearing the same shape.

Working out where you are

1. Count your live products.
2. Check which threshold that puts you past.
3. Ask an outsider to predict your categories.
4. Look at how sales spread across the range.
5. Test whether search exists and works.
6. Remove what nobody buys.
7. Diarise a review at the next threshold.

Step four is usually the alarming one, since sales concentrated in a handful of items is a finding rather than a coincidence.

Stock accuracy at scale is covered in stock levels you cannot keep accurate.

Frequently asked questions

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