Why a 2500-SKU Catalog Is Killing Your eCommerce Conversion Rate

We recently worked with a tableware brand, porcelain, 18 years in business, 9 employees. A solid company. Custom B2B makes up 60% of revenue, the physical store 8%, and eCom less than 5% and dropping. And when you look at their site, you quickly understand why. 2500 SKUs. A WooCommerce site built in 2013, tweaked every month since, still standing but seriously showing its age.

And that dense catalog is their strength on the B2B side. A pro buyer hunting for a specific oval platter to kit out their restaurant loves landing on 2500 options. The more choice there is, the better his odds of finding his exact piece. But in B2C, it's the exact opposite. The consumer gets lost. They find the site "very B2B," not glamorous, not desirable. And they leave.

My philosophy on eCom, and I repeat it all day long, is that anything that can be removed should be removed. People have zero time and zero attention. Every extra SKU is one more chance to lose the customer along the way.

More products, fewer sales

There's a counterintuitive truth that a lot of founders refuse to hear. The more products you offer, the less you sell.

I made a bet with a client, a multi-brand retailer, to cut their range by 50%. The result was a huge impact in the right direction. By keeping only the pieces that actually sell, you mechanically boost your odds of selling. Merchandising becomes far simpler to manage. And above all, the customer falls in love much more easily than when they're swimming in an open stock of 2500 items.

A consumer landing on your store doesn't want to run market research. They want to be shown what to buy. If you dump 2500 porcelain SKUs on them with no hierarchy, you're handing them all the mental load. They have to sort, compare, second-guess. And after three pages, they close the tab.

And it shows in the conversion stats. On a big catalog, there are 5 or 6 pages that actually drive traffic, that get viewed, that convert. The rest are dead pages. Products nobody sees, nobody buys. But they stay there, cluttering the menu, diluting the traffic. If you funnel your visitors onto fewer pages, it's much easier to do your merchandising properly and steer performance.

Guide toward a range the business has already validated

When you launch or relaunch a brand in B2C, the question isn't how to show your whole catalog, it's how to guide the customer toward the right products.

And in the case of this porcelain brand, the answer was practically handed to us on a plate. They have 18 years of B2B wholesale sales behind them. They know exactly which pieces work, which ones restaurant owners reorder every year. That's exactly the data you need to exploit.

So you kick off B2C with a tight collection, built around those already-proven best-sellers. You show the consumer a clear, short, easy-to-grasp range. And as it starts turning, you expand. You test new pieces, watch the KPIs, keep what converts, drop what sits idle.

I did this with a multi-brand retailer and a home decor client, same result, conversion up on the tightened pages. You build a category page specific to acquisition, you place your products manually, best-sellers only. And you redo your merchandising every two weeks by looking at the numbers for each product. You've got 25 products on your page, you pull the 5 that drag it down, you push up the 5 that crush it. It's hand-steered, and it's devastatingly effective.

The upside of a smaller catalog is that you can turn things into events. A new piece coming in, a new collection, becomes an event. Drowned in 2500 SKUs, nobody would ever see it.

If you want to dig into how to steer your acquisition based on your growth stage, I cover it here in the strategy that takes you from $1M to $3M.

"But a big catalog is great for the customer to find their piece"

One of the agencies the brand consulted was pushing this argument. A big catalog is awesome, because the shopper looking for a breakfast bowl, a cake stand or an oval platter will stumble onto it.

Except that's good for SEO. For conversion, it changes nothing. Having 2500 pages to catch someone typing "porcelain oval platter" somewhere means you're thinking traffic when you should be thinking purchase. And traffic that doesn't convert is just people walking past your window without coming in.

Traffic on your site works like foot traffic in a store. If you bring 1000 people into a shop where they find nothing, where everything's dumped across 2500 shelves, they walk out empty-handed. Better to have 300 people arriving at a clean display, 20 pieces well presented, who leave with a box in hand.

And honestly, the big brands prove it every day. Nike has been selling Air Max for decades and keeps selling them. They're not trying to release 2500 models. They push the pieces that work. In fashion and lifestyle, founders are often creatives who want to develop new products non-stop. It's an urge I understand, but it works against your conversion.

On acquisition, stop pushing the whole catalog

This issue extends well beyond the product page and the menu. On acquisition, it's the same, and it's even more brutal.

If you run catalog campaigns pushing all 2500 SKUs, or shopping feeds throwing everything out there, it's wasted money and wasted performance. You dilute your budget across products that don't convert, and you build an under-the-radar dependence on your best-sellers without ever really spotlighting them.

What you should do is stop pushing the whole catalog and keep only the top 20 products. A clean entry point, pages that convert, and all your budget behind them. And behind that, a landing page designed for the purchase, not to show off everything you can do.

On collection pages, I've noticed a pattern. The conversion rate climbs as you go deeper into the pages. Page 1 at 2%, page 2 at 3%, and it keeps rising. And for good reason, the people scrolling all the way to page 3 are hyper-qualified, they're genuinely searching. But most visitors never even reach the product page. They drop off before. With a dense catalog, you lose a ton of people between the homepage and the product.

If you want to go further on how to structure your product pages and your merchandising, one color one product or everything as variants on Shopify tackles this hierarchy logic head-on.

Where to actually start

If you're in the situation this brand was in, with a massive catalog and an eCom operation doing 20 to 30 orders a month at a $150-180 basket, here's what I'd do.

You start from your wholesale data or your existing sales stats. You pull the top 20 or 30 pieces that truly perform. You build a tight B2C collection around that, with desirable visuals, because in eCom you sell with the photo first. You clean up your menu to concentrate traffic on 5 or 6 pages max. And you steer your merchandising every two weeks, no hand-wringing, pulling whatever sits idle.

The dense catalog you keep for B2B, where it's a genuine asset. But your consumer eCom you build tight and guided. And you expand only when the numbers tell you you're ready.

Within the first month you'll already know which pieces to keep.