Do you discontinue?

Wide selection or only good sellers?

[Tonearm]

Do you discontinue a product that doesn't sell well to give your well-selling products more exposure, or do you try to offer as many relevant products as possible?

[King_Fisher]

There are three catagories of products; the winners, the also ran and the losers.
Keep the winners, thin out the also rans and drop the losers. From time to time insert some new products in the line up and see if they will fly.
In short your product line shouldnt get static or stale. It should be in a constant state of improvement. Just like a football or baseball line ups!...KF

[Tonearm]

By "also ran" do you mean the ones that sell OK?

So you basically remove any product that doesn't sell well?

[Wlauzon]

It depends, but usually not.

We do park them out of the mainstream of popular products.

But I am not so sure that listing only well selling products is the best for SEO either, so I am reluctant to drop pages that show up well in SERPS even if we don't sell much. Hopefully if nothing else, it helps get more people to the site.

[sun818]

If you are building niches, you want wider selection on a narrow product line (e.g. Zappos = 17 football fields of shoes!). Better for SEO and to be seen as an authority by others. If you focus too heavily on your best sellers, a competitor can come along and wipe out your niche (think Walmart!)

[rocknbil]

Loser products are awesome "over $100 order" gifts (if they are not too spendy.) :-)

[topr8]

here's a question for you ... why let your competitors know which are the hot products?

[Essex_boy]

The regular sellers I move to the top of the page I still carry the less than wonderfull selersbut these are replaced by by my supplier.

They then start at tthe bottom of the page.

[Tonearm]

Yeah, I think they're worth keeping around as long as product listings are sorted by popularity.

[hellraiser1]

product listings and categorization placement needs to be based on user history and popularity. if you sell thousands of unique items, then you want the winers up front as most will associate with them and buy. otherwise you ll have frustrated browsers who cant find what you know they most likely want.

It would be too easy to go to either extreme, and at the same time dangerous. If you only sell your top sellers, then a serp update or competitor will eat you, or if you have too many items, then no one will find the sellers which do most the selling got to do the work to interact with your target market and show then what they need to buy and in an efficient manner. Then offer alternatives and cross selling, then offer checkout shipping options.

don't make them think why

[rocknbil]

then you want the winers up front

.... so they can take the first bullet.

Sorry, carry on, I couldn't resist. ;-)