The Product That Never Sells

Every catalogue has them

Lines that have not sold in twelve months, sitting alongside the ones that pay the bills.

They were added for a reason: a supplier offered them, a customer asked once, the range looked thin without them, or somebody thought they would do well.

Nothing removes them, because no single item is worth the decision, and a catalogue of forty becomes a catalogue of two hundred and twenty over four years without anybody choosing that.

What a dead line actually costs

More than the shelf space, and most of the cost is invisible.

It is a page to keep accurate when prices, specifications, or suppliers change.

It is a line in every stock check and every catalogue review.

It is a result competing with your good products in your own category pages and your own search.

And where you hold stock, it is money sitting still, plus the space it occupies, plus the eventual write-off when it becomes obsolete or damaged.

None of that is large individually, which is precisely why it accumulates.

Dead or hidden

The distinction that decides everything, and skipping it is how shops delete products people wanted.

Pull two numbers for each candidate: how many people viewed the page in a year, and how many bought.

No views and no sales means nobody found it. That is a visibility problem, and deleting it removes something you never actually tested.

Views but no sales means people found it and chose not to buy. That is a page, price, or product problem, and the page will usually tell you which.

Only the second is evidence about the product itself.

When it is hidden

The common causes are dull and fixable.

• Wrong category, or a category nobody visits.
• Named the trade way rather than the customer way.
• Not in search results because of vocabulary.
• No photograph, or a supplier image nobody can read.
• Nothing links to it from anywhere on the site.
• Buried on page four of a category with no sensible sort.

Fix the naming and the category first, since those are twenty minutes and frequently produce sales from a product that appeared dead.

When people looked and did not buy

A more interesting finding, and one worth a few minutes on each.

Price is the obvious suspect and is often not the answer. Check what a customer would compare it against, including what you charge for the neighbouring product, since an item can be reasonably priced and look expensive beside its shelfmate.

Then check the page: is there a photograph that shows the item clearly, is the description telling anybody who it suits, are the specifications complete, is the delivery cost sensible relative to the item.

A low-value item with high shipping is a common silent killer, because the total at checkout is what people react to rather than the price on the page.

A worked example

A supplier reviewed a hundred and eighty products and found sixty-one with no sales in a year.

Splitting them by page views changed the picture completely.

Thirty-four had almost no views. Most were in a category nobody visited, and a dozen were named using the manufacturer's terminology.

Twenty-one had steady views and no sales. Checking those found eight where shipping cost more than the item, six with no photograph, and four priced above a larger competitor selling the identical thing.

Six had views and no sales for no discoverable reason.

They recategorised and renamed the thirty-four, fixed the photographs and shipping on the twenty-one, and discontinued the six.

About half of the recategorised items sold within three months, having appeared entirely dead.

Discontinuing properly

Removing a product is not deleting a page, and doing it carelessly costs you traffic you had.

If the page has any visitors or any links, redirect it to the nearest equivalent product or to its category rather than letting it return not found.

Where there is a genuine successor, say so on the way through, because somebody searching for the old item is a customer for the new one.

Where there is not, the category page is the honest destination.

Keep the record of what was discontinued and when, since customers will ask about it for years and staff need to be able to answer.

Stock you already hold

A separate decision from whether to keep listing it.

Money already spent is gone, and holding an item because it cost you something is the reasoning that produces a storeroom full of things nobody wants.

The realistic options are to sell it at a discount, bundle it with something that does sell, offer it to trade contacts, or accept the loss and clear the space.

Clearing at a loss feels bad and is frequently correct, because the space, the stock check time, and the attention are worth more than the difference.

Do it as a deliberate clearance rather than as a permanent discount, so it does not train customers to expect the reduced price on everything else.

What to keep despite no sales

Some lines earn their place without selling.

An item that anchors the range, making the mid-priced option look reasonable, which is doing work on the products either side of it.

Anything your best customers occasionally need, where not stocking it sends them to a competitor for everything.

Consumables and spares for equipment you sold, where availability is part of what the original purchase was.

And anything that brings people in, even if they then buy something else, which your analytics will show as a landing page rather than as a sale.

The counter-case

Aggressive pruning has a failure mode worth naming.

A range trimmed to only the fast movers stops being a range, and a customer who cannot get the unusual item from you learns to go elsewhere first, which eventually costs the ordinary items too.

Breadth is part of what some businesses sell, particularly in trade supply, and the slow lines are the reason customers treat you as a single source.

The judgement is whether the tail is deliberate or accumulated. A supplier stocking awkward items on purpose, and saying so, is running a strategy. A shop with sixty lines nobody chose to keep is carrying a cost it never decided to pay.

The review

1. List products with no sales in twelve months.
2. Add page views beside each one.
3. No views: fix the category, the name, and the photograph.
4. Views, no sales: check price, shipping, and the page.
5. Neither works: discontinue and redirect the address.
6. Clear the stock deliberately, as a one-off.
7. Keep the deliberate tail, and write down why.

Step two is the whole exercise, and most shops go straight from step one to step five.

How range size changes everything is covered in ten products or two hundred.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.