Every item on your shelf takes up room. Generally, a good seller takes just as much place as a poor seller. It also takes just as much time and effort in looking after it and possibly even more time in dusting, and it earns less.
Here is a picture of a pen rack
I can guarantee you that only a few pen types here are making most of the sales. When I reported on the pen sales on one brand in a shop over three years, I found that they had sold over 450 different types of pens and something like 80% of the profit was in the top 10% of pens.
Towards the end of this list, sales were like one sale in three years, and there were pages of these items. Consider how much profit they are making on these slower-moving items.
What is also particularly interesting is that the most profitable pen was not mainly a high seller. Looking at this list, it is clear the most popular one is a black pen. I bet people came into the store, with one thought about the pen, I need a simple black pen. It is quite possible the range did not sell much of these pens but the convenience.
The reality is that we cannot be all things to all people. Maybe fewer products would be better than more. Perhaps some of your space could be used instead of having many mediocre items and replacing them with a new category of things that are outstanding sellers. Could that shelf space be devoted to quicker-moving, more marketable items?
Want to investigate your stock, here is a step by step method for doing this.
Go to register reports and select the top stock report as marked with the red arrow here.
You get this screen
In this case, here I used the category of Artline pens, I put in 99 million in to make sure I get everything, and as I like to get a long term view, I selected three years.
Then I got the above report
Once you get this right, if you want to increase your stock range in this category, well you can expand your business later.
