Too many products?

is there such a thing?

[pbradish]

Hey all,

I remember reading a tip thread here on WW about six months ago with plenty of advice in regards to Ecommerce. One tip in particular intrigues me and I was curious as to what everyone else thinks.

The tip was that If a product does not sell, remove it. This sounds basic enough and I do indeed have a few products which have been listed for 6+ months without a sale on them. Is it time to take them down? Or should one leave them up for SEO purposes?

I'm wondering if limiting the choices a potential customer may have might help increase conversions as they will have less to be confused over.

Any thoughts?

[ytswy]

It certainly can make sense - our most successful site lists only a small percentage of the products that it could do. This is quite deliberate since the whole point of the site is to simplify the purchase of complicated products which have detailed compatibility requirements - our core market want a simple experience and some hand-holding, rather than to be forced to choose between loads of products they don't understand.

On our more general sites I'd generally only remove a product we had gone to the trouble of writing a description for if it reflected badly on us - eg it is poor quality or overpriced. Although I suppose you might get to a point where your categorisation system is creaking so badly that pruning down makes sense. Never really been in that position since our lines tend to go obsolete relatively quickly.

[wtkad]

If you're referring to the same thread I'm thinking of, I think the idea was to remove items that you are not capable of selling, or have no plans to actually sell. Not to remove all items that people aren't buying.

It may be better for your site to take them down for other reasons, of course, like simplicity. But I think that's a separate issue.

[Rugles]

>>>This sounds basic enough and I do indeed have a few products which have been listed for 6+ months without a sale on them. Is it time to take them down? Or should one leave them up for SEO purposes?

I leave them up. For SEO purposes and you never know if someday you wake up and there is a demand for a product, or your competion raises their price,,, yada yada

We have 13 000 products on our main site and add new ones every work day.

[treeline]

Amazon is hanging in there....

[pbradish]

Very true, all valid points. Thanks guys.

[ispy]

I don't think it's limiting the products which could potentially benefit sales, it's limiting the niche. If you have only one niche (like gardening) you become known as a gardening shop which increases sales because people remember you for that or view you as a somewhat authority in that area.

If you are more like a general store with everything under the sun, then the more different products the better since you are trying to snag any sale possible from visitors which could be looking for anything.

[BradleyT]

Some positives:
It doesn't really "cost" you anything to keep the product up unless you're using physical inventory space for it
SEO may lead to purchases of similar but more popular items
Bigger is better - In general I'd feel more comfortable buying from a site with 100 products than a site with only 1 or 2 products

Some negative:
Consumer overload when they see 500 different types of a single product. Effective filtering can offset this negative somewhat as well as a "help me choose" link/tutorial.

[Sreekanth]

Hi pbradish,

This is an old topic but just in case someone is checking in. From your question it is evident that you do not keep inventory specifically for online sales. Otherwise this question doesn't arise. Assuming no inventory, keeping things listed even if they don't sell might someday result in your taking advantage of Chris Anderson's Long Tail effect i.e. the sum of your least selling inventory totalling up to more than your best-sellers. And since you never know what sells out of the least selling products, better not take it off.

That said the concept of Long Tail is applicable only in certain categories primarily, Books, Music, Movies and also in cases were the online retail site has a huge list of products to sell like an Amazon or iTunes. The concept may not be that applicable to smaller retail sites beyond a point.

Also the only real advantage of taking of a listed product is increasing the ease of finding of remaining products. If you have properly categorised your products this is a significant problem only beyond 15-20 categories etc. And this again is not a reason to take off a product.

Hope this clarifies the situation for you.

Cheers,
Sreekanth.

[edited by: lorax at 1:40 pm (utc) on Mar. 27, 2007]
[edit reason] no URLs please, see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[karim0028]

I would like to chime in here..... Now, ive only been doing this for a little while compared to alot of the more experienced folks on here...

I would say it depends how the site is percieved, some sites buy and put up the DB that contains a ton of products with lame in the box style pictures that have one line descriptions.

If thats the case i think customers can see right through that and see that this is a premade list and that the retailer doesnt really care about the merchandise he is selling and could be a fly by night operation.

IMHO, it is better to limit your products and invest the time in putting good pics and descriptions then just to have pages and pages of shoddy pics and descriptions. Also, organization of the products is another facet to consider is it easy to find the products your looking for?

Putting on my consumer hat i like seeing a limited selection bc i get "confused" by all of the options... If i find a limited yet quality selection i think this retalier has put the time in to find the best products and therefore i may be better off with one of these "exclusive" products than by taking my chance with the run of the mill retailer who lists every product under the sun.