> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Slow-Moving Products, Shopify > Bottom decile by revenue. Candidates for sunset / clearance / repositioning. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it. **Metrics type:** [Supporting Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained) • **Category:** [Ecommerce Platform](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type) > 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. | | | | ----------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **What it counts** | `GROUP BY product_id ORDER BY SUM(line_item.discountedTotal) ASC LIMIT bottom_decile`. Each product (not variant) is one row, with its 90-day revenue summed across every line item that referenced it. | | **API endpoint** | `Admin GraphQL. Order.lineItems.edges.node.product` joined with `Product.id, status, variants[]`. Products with `status = ACTIVE` only; archived and draft are excluded. | | **VAT / tax treatment** | Follows the parent line item's `discountedTotalSet.shopMoney.amount`, which is post-discount, pre-tax for `taxesIncluded = false` stores (US) and post-discount, post-tax for `taxesIncluded = true` stores (UK / EU). The card sums the field as Shopify reports it, no normalisation. | | **Shipping** | Excluded. Line item revenue, not order revenue. | | **Discounts** | Already deducted (the `discountedTotal` is post-discount). | | **Refunds** | NOT deducted. A heavily-refunded product still shows its gross sales. To net out, pair this card with [Top Refunded Products](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/top-refunding-customers). | | **Cancelled / voided orders** | Included. Line items on `VOIDED` orders still contribute. The card optimises for visibility, not financial reporting. | | **Currency** | Multi-currency arithmetic sum WITHOUT FX conversion. Stores transacting in more than one currency get a meaningless ranking; filter to a single currency for clean reads. | | **Channels / sources** | Not filtered. Online Store, POS, Buy Button, marketplace channels all contribute. A product that sells well in retail but poorly online still shows here. | | **Zero-sales products** | Products with zero 90-day sales ARE included. They sort to the very bottom of the list with revenue = 0 and are typically the highest-priority sunset candidates. | | **Time window** | `90D` (single window, no vsP comparison) | | **Alert trigger** | None. This is a curation tool, not an anomaly detector. | | **Roles** | owner, operations | ## Calculation ``` GROUP BY product name ASC SUM(revenue) WHERE date BETWEEN [period_start, period_end] ``` ## 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: | Rank | Product | 90D revenue | 90D units | Inventory on hand | Last sold | | ---- | --------------------------------- | ----------- | --------- | ----------------- | --------- | | 612 | Ceramic plant pot, charcoal, 30cm | £0 | 0 | 14 units | 04 Aug 25 | | 611 | Linen napkin set, sage, 4-pack | £0 | 0 | 32 sets | 18 Sep 25 | | 610 | Brass candle holder, small | £0 | 0 | 9 units | 12 Nov 25 | | 609 | Wool throw, oatmeal | £0 | 0 | 6 units | 02 Dec 25 | | 608 | Wooden tray, oak, large | £42 | 1 | 18 units | 28 Mar 26 | | 607 | Glass vase, smoke, tall | £58 | 1 | 22 units | 14 Apr 26 | | 606 | Cotton cushion cover, terracotta | £64 | 2 | 41 units | 03 May 26 | | 605 | Marble coaster set, 6-pack | £75 | 2 | 28 sets | 09 Apr 26 | | 604 | Ceramic mug, navy | £88 | 4 | 67 units | 11 May 26 | | 603 | Stoneware bowl, blush, small | £95 | 3 | 19 units | 06 May 26 | Five things to notice: 1. **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. 2. **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. 3. **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. 4. **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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/top-refunding-customers) before sunsetting; refund-heavy products are different problems (sizing, quality) from no-sales products (visibility, demand). 5. **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: | Card | Why pair it with Slow-Moving Products | What the combination tells you | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | [Top Products by Revenue](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/top-products-by-revenue) | The mirror image. Compare top vs bottom decile widths. | A healthy catalogue has a 80/20 (top 20% drives 80% revenue). A flat catalogue with no clear winners signals merchandising drift. | | [Top Refunded Products](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/top-refunding-customers) | Products with high gross sales but high refunds may rank higher than they should on the bottom-products view. | Cross-reference before sunsetting. A refund-heavy product is a quality / sizing problem, not a demand problem. | | [Inventory Distribution](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/inventory-distribution) | Shows working capital tied up by SKU. | Bottom-decile SKUs with high inventory on hand are the real working-capital bleed. | | [Stock vs Sales](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/stock-vs-sales-velocity) | Velocity ratio per SKU. | A bottom-decile SKU with 40+ units of stock and 0 velocity is a clearance candidate; one with 2 units and 0 velocity is just out of stock. | | [Products by Type](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/products-by-type) | Tells you if entire categories are dragging. | If 30 of the bottom 61 share one productType, the whole category may be dying, not individual SKUs. | | [Collection Health](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/collection-category-count) | Are these products even visible to shoppers? | Zero-sales SKUs are often missing from collection pages, leaving them stranded in catalogue search-only purgatory. | | [`bigcommerce.bottom_products`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/bigcommerce/slow-moving-products) | Same definition for agencies running cross-platform clients. | Documentation cross-link, not a reconciliation. | | [`adobe_commerce.bottom_products`](/nerve-centre/adobe_commerce/bottom_products) | Same definition for Adobe Commerce stores. | Documentation cross-link. | ## Reconciling against the vendor's own dashboard **Where to look in Shopify Admin:** The closest Shopify-native view is: > [Analytics → Reports → "Sales by product"](https://admin.shopify.com/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. **Why our number may legitimately differ from Shopify Admin:** | Reason | Direction | Why | | --------------------- | ------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Refund treatment** | Shopify lower (Net sales view) | Shopify's "Net sales by product" deducts refunds from the line item. This card sums gross. A product with high refund rate looks better here than in Shopify Admin. | | **Time zone** | Boundary days | Shopify uses store time zone for the 90D boundary; Vortex IQ uses UTC. The first / last day of the window may differ by 1 to 24 hours of orders. | | **Channel filtering** | Either | Shopify's report can be filtered by sales channel; this card aggregates across all channels by default. POS-heavy SKUs look stronger in the Shopify all-channel view than in an online-only filtered view. | | **Multi-currency** | Ours is wrong-shape | Shopify converts all sales to store currency; this card sums in original currencies without FX. Multi-currency stores should filter to a single currency in the OpenSearch index for clean reads. | | **Status filter** | Theirs higher | Shopify's report includes archived and draft products by default; this card filters to `status = ACTIVE`. The bottom of Shopify's list is almost always recently archived stock. | | **Bundle accounting** | Either | Shopify Bundles attribute revenue to the bundle SKU. Component SKUs sold via bundles can appear lower-velocity here than they really are. | **Cross-connector reconciliation:** This is a Shopify-internal merchandising metric. There is no direct cross-connector twin. The closest analytic peers are: | Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [`google_analytics.ga_top_products`](/nerve-centre/google_analytics/ga_top_products) | Inverted ranking, the opposite tail of GA4's product report | GA4 sees view-then-purchase events, not unit sales. A product with 0 GA4 page views will not even appear in GA4 reports, hiding the worst dead-stock cases. | | [`google_ads.google_low_performance_keywords`](/nerve-centre/google_ads/google_low_performance_keywords) | Cross-platform waste | Ad keywords pointing at slow-moving SKUs are the highest-ROI pause candidates. | | [`amazon_ads.amazon_oos_skus`](/nerve-centre/amazon_ads/amazon_oos_skus) | Inventory truth check | A SKU on this list with active Amazon ads is dual-channel waste. | ***
Same-metric documentation cross-reference (for agencies running multiple platforms) The same definition lives on other commerce platforms. This is **not a reconciliation**, your Shopify store does not have a parallel store on BigCommerce or Adobe Commerce. These cross-links exist so agencies running multi-platform client books can navigate between identical metrics across the docs. * [`bigcommerce.bottom_products`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/bigcommerce/slow-moving-products) * [`adobe_commerce.bottom_products`](/nerve-centre/adobe_commerce/bottom_products)
## 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 a `createdAt` 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: 1. Filter for `created_at < 90 days ago` (true low-velocity, not new launches). 2. Cross-reference against [Inventory Distribution](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/inventory-distribution), products with high stock + zero sales are the urgent sunset candidates. 3. Cross-reference against [Top Refunded](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/top-refunding-customers), refund-driven low net sales is a quality / sizing fix, not a sunset. 4. Cross-reference against wholesale and retail channels, products may sell offline at trade fairs without showing in Shopify online sales. 5. Survivors of the above are the genuine sunset / clearance candidates. Plan a 30 to 50% clearance discount for those. **Multi-store / multi-region, how does this card work?** Each Shopify store is a separate Vortex IQ integration. The card runs per store. If you sell the "same" product on the UK and US storefronts under separate SKUs, each store's bottom-products list is independent. To see a global view, sum at the parent-product level outside the card today; a global cross-store rollup is on the roadmap. **Multi-currency, how does the ranking work?** Poorly, on stores transacting in more than one currency. The card sums revenue in original currency without FX conversion, so a £100 sale and a €100 sale add to 200 (currency-blind). For accurate multi-currency reads, filter the OpenSearch index to a single `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:** 1. Pull this card with 90D window. 2. Filter mentally to `created > 90 days ago`. 3. Sort by `inventory on hand × cost` (highest dead-capital first). 4. For top 20 dead-capital items: decide between clearance, repackaging (bundle into kits), or sunset. 5. For the rest: schedule a re-merchandising review (collection placement, photography, copy, price test). 6. Set a 30-day check-in to measure whether the action moved the SKUs off the list. *** ### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre *Slow-Moving Products* is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Shopify and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. [Start for free](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.