Judge products like employees: on contribution, not charm

A product earns its place in your range the way an employee earns a seat: by contributing. But while every business reviews its people, almost none reviews its products with the same seriousness. Products get hired easily, reviewed never, and fired only when the shelf space runs out.

Sales rank is the wrong league table

The default judgement — units sold — flatters the wrong products. A proper performance review asks four questions per product:

What margin does it leave, not what revenue does it bring? A bestseller at wafer margin can contribute less cash than a slow seller at strong margin.

What does it cost to hold? Weeks of shelf and stockroom life per sale. Two products with identical margin are not equals if one turns weekly and one quarterly — the slow one is charging you rent.

Who does it bring in? Some low-margin products are doors: they appear in baskets alongside your best margin. Killing a door product loses more than its own line. This is where basket analysis earns its keep — the answer is in your till data.

Which direction is it moving? A modest product growing steadily deserves different treatment from a strong product in slow decline — the trend often matters more than today's rank.

The quiet quadrant

Cross margin against velocity and every range shows the same map: stars (protect), doors (keep, priced to walk past), workhorses (fine, automate), and the bottom-left quadrant — slow *and* thin — where the honest answer is usually the exit. That quadrant is stocked almost entirely by history: things that once sold, things the owner championed, things nobody ever re-decided. An ABC analysis gets you most of this map in an afternoon.

Make it a calendar event, not a crisis response

The failure mode is running this review only when cash gets tight — which is precisely when clearing dead stock hurts most. Quarterly, calmly, top twenty and bottom twenty, is enough. Kauzio keeps the four questions answered continuously — margin, turn, basket role, trajectory — and flags products drifting toward the exit quadrant, so the review becomes reading a page rather than building a spreadsheet. Ranges drift; the review is the correction. Every product is on the payroll. Ask what each one does all day.