Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer. I want to start with a picture. Imagine someone walks through the front door of your shop, and the very first thing they see, pride of place in the window, is a mannequin with nothing on it. No outfit. No reason to stay. Just a bare plastic figure where your best product should be. We would never let that happen in a physical store. And yet, as I found out this week, most of us are doing exactly that online without even realising it. What merchandising actually isMy guest this week is Leon Bart-Williams, co-founder of Akikumo, a Shopify tool that helps lean teams merchandise like they've got a whole department doing it. Before this he built the first shoppable-TV commerce experience at NBCUniversal and spent years at Amazon watching brands go from nothing to millions. We don't talk about merchandising much on the show, which is odd, because it might be the most overlooked driver of conversion there is. Leon defines it beautifully. It's putting the right product in the right place at the right time in front of the right audience, with the right inventory to satisfy that demand. Or, more simply, it's the process of turning your inventory into sales. Then he gave me the line that stuck. | “Think of the first 10 slots of your website as the moment someone walks through the door of a physical store and sees a mannequin with nothing on.”
Leon Bart-Williams |
Out-of-stock products sitting in the prime positions of your bestsellers, your new arrivals, your top collections. Nobody meant to put them there. They just drifted in as the catalogue grew. Does this change how we do ads?Leon pointed out that a lot of us are running ads straight to products people can't buy. Not out of malice. Out of simple human error. He told me about a brand he's friends with called Johnny O. He popped their name into Meta's Ad Library, had a quick look, and noticed one of their top-selling products had three-quarters of its variants sold out, sitting in the top ad slot. One email to the team and they repointed it. And this is the clever part. He talked about the 80/20 rule at the variant level. Roughly 20% of a product's variants drive about 80% of its sales. So the dress in blue, size 2, might be most of that product's revenue. If that one variant sells out, the listing still looks in stock, but you're effectively paying to advertise something nobody can buy. Your ad money is landing on a mannequin with nothing on. The scary thing is how early this starts impacting us. Not at tens of thousands of SKUs. Leon reckons it kicks in around 400 to 500, especially in apparel where every size and colour multiplies. Why fewer options sell moreThe other thread I loved was curation. Leon's view is that more products does not mean more sales. People don't actually want more choice. They want to be told what to do. I mentioned the famous jam experiment on the show, where a shop put out 6 jars of jam one week and 36 the next. You'd assume more flavours means more sales. The opposite happened. Sales fell with the bigger range, because too much choice is paralysing. So Leon's rule is to keep collections tight, 50 products or fewer, and to curate them like a story. The hero dress, then the handbag, then the shoes that go with it. One of each, not a wall of options. That's the art half of merchandising. The science half is simply knowing how many. What I learned from this episodeLeon talked about stock sitting on shelves being cash that isn't doing anything. That’ll preach. I've lived both ends of this. When we ran the beauty business, we carried about 7 days of stock, because we could reorder from the manufacturer whenever we needed and they held the risk. Lovely and lean. These days I've got a supplement brand where some products have an 18-month lead time. Eighteen months. If I get the forecast wrong there, that's cash locked up for a year and a half with nothing I can do about it. So when Leon says you have to understand your sales velocity down to the variant level before you cut a purchase order, I know exactly how right he is. Guess the sizes and colours wrong and you spend the whole season burning through stock that was never going to move. | 
