Bottom decile by revenue. Candidates for sunset / clearance / repositioning.
At a glance
The bottom decile of your active catalogue ranked by 90-day revenue. The list every quarterly merchandising review should start with: which SKUs are tying up working capital, taking up shelf space on collection pages, and earning their keep on neither acquisition nor retention.
Calculation
Worked example
A UK DTC homeware brand on Shopify, 612 active SKUs in catalogue. Period: 12 Feb 26 to 12 May 26 (90 days). The card surfaces the bottom decile, 61 products, but the operational story sits in the bottom 15:
Five things to notice:
- Zero-sales SKUs are the priority. Products 609 to 612 have not sold in 4+ months. Combined inventory value at cost is roughly £1,400. Either the listings are broken (no images, hidden from collection, mis-tagged), or the products are genuinely dead. A 5-minute audit of the 4 PDPs answers the question.
- The next tier (608 to 612) is the discounting question. They sold 1 to 2 units in 90 days. Either the price is wrong, the photography is wrong, or these are seasonal items in the wrong season (oak tray in spring is plausible). A 30% clearance discount on these 5 SKUs would clear 200+ units of working capital at a manageable margin hit.
- Inventory on hand reveals the working capital bleed. Line 612 (charcoal plant pot) holds 14 units of stock against zero 90-day sales. At a typical homeware cost of £8 per unit, that is £112 of dead capital sitting on shelf. Multiply by the 30 worst SKUs and a typical merchant discovers £3,000 to £8,000 of dead working capital.
- The card excludes refunds, so survival bias is hidden. A product that sold 50 units but had 35 refunded shows £750 net sales but £2,000 gross on this card, ranking it well above its true performance. Always cross-reference Top Refunded Products before sunsetting; refund-heavy products are different problems (sizing, quality) from no-sales products (visibility, demand).
- Channel mix can defend the SKU. The wooden tray sold 1 unit online but might be doing 12 a month at the brand’s stockist or weekly market stall. POS and online both feed this card, but a wholesale SKU sold at trade-shows offline (not via Shopify POS) is invisible here. Check sell-through with the wholesale team before pulling.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
The bottom-products list answers “what to cut”, but the decision needs context. Pair it with these:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Shopify Admin: The closest Shopify-native view is:Analytics → Reports → “Sales by product” (Under the Sales category. Sort the Net sales column ascending.)Pick the same 90-day date range. Sort Net sales ASC. The bottom of the list should mirror this card to within reconciliation tolerances. Other Shopify Admin views that look similar but are not the same:
- Reports → Sell-through rate: a velocity ratio (units sold / units stocked), not a revenue ranking. A high-priced low-volume luxury item can have low sell-through but high revenue and would not appear here.
- Products → All products → sort by Total sales: a product-list-level view, but Shopify’s product list does not always include zero-sales products by default; toggle the column visibility.
- Apps like Stocky, Inventory Planner: include incoming POs and forecast demand. They give you a forward-looking sunset signal; this card is purely backward-looking 90D.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
This is a Shopify-internal merchandising metric. There is no direct cross-connector twin. The closest analytic peers are:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is a product I just launched on the bottom-products list? Because the 90D window starts before launch. A product launched 14 days ago has only 14 days of sales attributed against a 90-day denominator, ranking it well below seasoned SKUs. Filter the list mentally for SKUs with acreatedAt older than 60 days, or wait until the product has a full 90-day track record before deciding.
Should I sunset every product on this list?
No. The list is the candidate pool, not the action list. A typical playbook:
- Filter for
created_at < 90 days ago(true low-velocity, not new launches). - Cross-reference against Inventory Distribution, products with high stock + zero sales are the urgent sunset candidates.
- Cross-reference against Top Refunded, refund-driven low net sales is a quality / sizing fix, not a sunset.
- Cross-reference against wholesale and retail channels, products may sell offline at trade fairs without showing in Shopify online sales.
- Survivors of the above are the genuine sunset / clearance candidates. Plan a 30 to 50% clearance discount for those.
presentmentCurrency before consulting the card. Most multi-currency Shopify Plus stores rank fine on the Top side (high revenue dominates), but the bottom decile can be distorted by currency mix.
Shopify Plus vs basic: any difference?
No definitional difference. Shopify Plus stores tend to have larger catalogues (thousands of SKUs), so the bottom decile is a longer list (a 5,000-SKU catalogue produces a 500-product bottom decile). The card returns the same shape; the merchant playbook is the same.
Refresh cadence?
The OpenSearch index updates from the Shopify GraphQL Bulk API on the standard reconciliation schedule (hourly for orders, daily for products). The 90-day rolling window updates at the same cadence. New product launches will appear in the catalogue within 24 hours of creation; their sales will appear within an hour.
B2B vs DTC, does the card behave differently?
B2B orders contribute the same way DTC orders do. A B2B-only product placed on a wholesale-only catalogue but with no recent wholesale orders will still appear here. A common B2B pattern is large infrequent orders (£5,000 every 90 days), in which case the product can swing from the top decile to the bottom decile and back depending on the timing of orders within the 90-day window. For B2B-heavy stores, expand the window to 180 or 365 days for stable rankings; this is on the configurability roadmap.
The card moved this week, what does that mean?
Bottom-decile membership turns over slowly. A product moving onto the list usually means a 60-day quiet period. A product moving off the list usually means it sold a few units this week. Track the number of zero-sales SKUs week-on-week; a rising count means dead inventory is accumulating, a falling count means clearance or sunsets are working.
Action playbook for the quarterly review:
- Pull this card with 90D window.
- Filter mentally to
created > 90 days ago. - Sort by
inventory on hand × cost(highest dead-capital first). - For top 20 dead-capital items: decide between clearance, repackaging (bundle into kits), or sunset.
- For the rest: schedule a re-merchandising review (collection placement, photography, copy, price test).
- Set a 30-day check-in to measure whether the action moved the SKUs off the list.