Automatic sorting takes care of the order. It cannot reorder stock, change a price or rewrite a product description. The data that drives the sort can, however, tell you where one of those is needed.
Below are seven patterns worth looking for every week. Each is a pair of numbers that disagree. They are the patterns Merchandiser reports as actionable insights, and you can look for them in any catalog that has views, add-to-carts, sales and stock per product.
1. High traffic, low conversion
The pattern: an in-stock product gets a lot of views and converts very few of them.
Customers are interested enough to click and not convinced enough to buy. The product is using a lot of attention and returning little.
What to check: price first, against your own range and against competitors. Then the images and the description. Then availability of sizes and variants, because a product whose popular sizes are gone converts badly for exactly that reason.
2. A best seller that is nearly out of stock
The pattern: strong weekly sales, and only a few units left.
At the current rate the product is gone within days, and it is probably in campaigns and in top positions right now.
What to do: replenish it. If that is not possible in time, reduce its promotion, so that the positions go to products that can still be sold next week.
3. Overstock with low demand
The pattern: a lot of stock, no sales and little traffic.
This product is not failing in front of customers. It is not in front of them at all. Capital is sitting in the warehouse while the page shows other things.
What to do: give it visibility before judging it. Move it up, include it in a campaign, review the price. If it still does not sell with traffic, you have learned something about the product and not about its position.
4. Cart interest that does not convert
The pattern: many add-to-carts, no purchases.
Customers got as far as the cart and stopped. Something happened between the intention and the payment.
What to check: the price including shipping, a competitor's offer, whether the stock in the cart is really sellable, and anything in the checkout that is specific to this product.
5. Demand for a product with few sizes left
The pattern: customers still view or buy the product, and most of its sizes are out of stock.
There is demand and no way to serve most of it.
What to do: restock the popular sizes if you can. Until then, lower the product's position, so that it does not hold a place most visitors cannot use. More on this in Size-Broken Products.
6. An active collection with no products
The pattern: a collection is live and contains nothing.
It can happen quietly, when the last products of a seasonal category sell out or a filter stops matching. The page is still linked from the menu and from search engines.
What to do: add products, or take the collection offline until it has some.
7. A sharp drop in collection traffic
The pattern: a collection gets far fewer visits this week than last week.
What to check: whether the page lost a link in the menu or on the home page, whether a campaign ended, and whether a recent change of the assortment or the order explains it. This is a prompt to look, not a verdict. Some drops are seasonal and expected.
Why pairs of numbers
Each of these looks harmless as a single number. High views are good. Low stock is normal. Many add-to-carts are welcome. The warning is in the combination, which is why these cases are easy to miss in a report sorted by one column.
It also means the same product can show up for different reasons over time. A product with high traffic and low conversion this week may be the one with too few sizes next week, and the action is different each time.
Make it a routine
A workable weekly routine:
- Start with the critical findings: products with heavy traffic that do not convert, and best sellers about to run out. These cost money every day.
- Send the stock-related findings to whoever orders stock.
- Pick a few overstocked products for the next campaign.
- Fix or close empty collections.
- Read the traffic drops last. Most have an ordinary explanation.
Merchandiser grades each insight as critical, warning or info, lets you filter by type and severity, and exports the list as a spreadsheet for the teams that act on it. The whole-collection view of the same data is the Collection Health Score, described in What a Healthy Category Page Looks Like.