Getly
Take every store with at least one active product this week. How many products does each hold? The answer is smaller than most sellers imagine when they picture their competition.
- Exactly one product — 66.4% of stores.
- Two to four — 22.5%.
- Five to nine — 7.1%.
- Ten to twenty-four — 2.7%. Twenty-five or more — 1.3%.
- The median store has one product.
So when you open a store to list your first product, you are joining the majority, not lagging behind it. The "store" on this marketplace is, in two cases out of three, a single listing with a name above it.
What catalogue size is, and is not, evidence of
We have compared stores that have sold at least once against stores that have not, and catalogue size is the one input that clearly differs — roughly 5.7 products against 2.6. It is tempting to read that as "publish more and you will sell." The data reads the other way as often: the median store that has sold made that first sale holding a single product, and grew afterwards. Catalogue size is partly what selling causes, not only what causes selling.
The honest version is narrower. A second product is a second chance at being found, in a second category, by a second search. It is not a multiplier on the first. And a store of one excellent product outperforms a store of five hurried ones in every measurement we have, because each of the five is competing with the others for the same store page.
Where bundles fit
Bundles are the feature that presumes a catalogue, and the numbers show exactly who uses them: 36 active bundles from 20 stores. The median bundle holds four products; the largest holds twenty-one; the median discount is 40%. Twenty stores is 1.2% of all active stores, and it is almost exactly the group holding ten or more products.
That is the right shape. A bundle of two products is a discount with extra steps. A bundle becomes worth building when a buyer who wants one of your products plausibly wants three, and that requires having three that go together — the same design system in three formats, the same course in three levels, the same font in three weights. If your store is one product, the bundle question does not arise yet, and no amount of feature exploration will make it arise.
How the storefront shows a catalogue
For the 4% with ten products or more, the storefront matters more than for anyone else, and it recently changed in two ways. The product grid loads up to two hundred products at once — it used to load fifty, which meant a 119-product store showed less than half of itself and its price sort silently sorted only the half that had loaded. And the bundles band shows up to twelve bundles instead of four, with a line saying how many are shown when there are more. Both changes came from the same seller noticing the same defect twice: the page was quietly showing a sample and calling it the catalogue.
If you are the one-product majority
Finish the one product. Give it the second image, the licence, the page count, the tags — the things two thirds of the catalogue skip. Then, if it sells, the second product has a reason to exist: it is what the people who bought the first one asked for. That is the order the successful stores actually followed, whatever the size of their catalogue today.
