When to retire a product that still sells a few copies a month

There is a product on your page you have not thought about in a year. It sells two or three copies a month, which is the most awkward number a product can produce: enough that removing it feels like throwing money away, not enough to matter. Meanwhile it generates a support email every fortnight, it needs updating whenever the software it depends on changes, and it takes up the third position on your storefront. Products like that are not neutral. They quietly cost more than they earn, and the only way to find out is to price the whole thing honestly.

Why the trickle is so hard to switch off

Money arriving is persuasive. Thirty dollars a month is thirty dollars you would not otherwise have, and there is no line in any dashboard showing what it costs you to keep collecting it. So the product stays, year after year, and the page slowly turns into an archive of everything you have ever made rather than a shop showing what you would recommend today.

The genuinely difficult part is that the costs are invisible and irregular. Support is the big one: a product you no longer remember writing generates the slowest replies, even when delivery itself is automatic, because you have to reload the whole thing in your head before you can answer a single question. Then there is upkeep — a template that breaks with a software update, a guide with a screenshot from two versions ago, a spreadsheet that assumes last year's tax rules. And there is the cost nobody counts, which is that a visitor's attention is finite and every weak product on the page spends some of it.

There is also a pride problem. It was good work. Taking it down feels like admitting it failed, when in fact most retired products did their job perfectly well and simply finished it.

An archive, or a shop

The difference between the two is a quarterly hour and a willingness to remove things. Your per-product analytics give you views, buyers and revenue for each item separately, which is the only fair way to compare a headline product with an old one that lingers.

The four numbers to write down

Do this per product, over the last ninety days, with the dashboard open. Four figures per product, five minutes each.

Four exits, in order of how much you lose

1. 1Raise the price. The cheapest fix, and it sometimes turns a trickle into a product worth keeping. Fewer buyers, the same revenue, less support per pound earned.
2. 2Fold it into a bundle. The product stops needing its own page position and its own sales argument, and it adds weight to something you do want to sell.
3. 3Make it a $0 lead magnet. If the material is still genuinely useful but nobody will pay for it now, let it earn contacts instead of revenue. The buyer still goes through checkout and still lands on your customer list.
4. 4Retire it. Announce it, give existing buyers a final updated file, and take it down. Replacing a file updates it for everyone who has already bought, so a proper last version is a graceful way to close the door.

The arithmetic on a plausible example

Take a $12 preset pack. Over ninety days it sells nine copies, so $108 before card fees. In the same period it produced six support emails, mostly about installing it on a version of the software you no longer use, at around twenty minutes each once you had reopened the files. Add a two-hour afternoon spent re-exporting the presets after an update. That is roughly four hours for $108, or about $27 an hour before anything else is counted.

The number that decides it is what else those four hours could have done. If your $79 course sells at a steady rate and has not been promoted since spring, four hours on the course is very likely worth more than four hours on the presets. So the presets go into the bundle with your other packs, the page drops from six products to five, and the support questions largely stop because bundle buyers are people who already own the rest of your work. Nothing here guarantees the course sells more. It does guarantee your attention is pointed at the thing with more room in it.

The mistake most people make

The common error is deleting rather than demoting. A product gets removed in a moment of tidying, and with it goes the only entry point some visitors ever used. Try the price rise first, then the bundle, then the free version, and keep retirement for things that are genuinely out of date or that you would be embarrassed to sell today. The second error is running this review while you are annoyed — after a bad support thread, everything looks like it should go. Do it quarterly, with the numbers in front of you, and compare the plans on the pricing page if the analytics you need for the decision sit above your current plan.

A shorter catalogue is not a smaller business. It is a business where every item on the page can defend the space it occupies, and where your evenings go to the products with the most room left in them. Book the hour, write down the four numbers, and let the arithmetic take the decision you have been avoiding.