Merchandising advice
Turning swatch clicks into decisions: restock, feature, investigate, retire.
Numbers are not decisions. The advice card on the Analytics page reads your click data and states what it suggests you do.
The data floor#
Advice unlocks at 30 swatch clicks. Below that the card shows a progress meter with how many more clicks are needed and what unlocks when you get there.
The floor exists because advice from five clicks is a coin toss with a confident voice. Thirty is the point where the ranking starts to mean something.
The four kinds of advice#
| Advice | Trigger | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Restock | High clicks while sold out. | Shoppers are asking for it and you have nothing to sell them. Usually the highest-value action on the page. |
| Feature | High clicks, good conversion, low visibility. | It is winning when shoppers find it. Move it up the swatch row, put it in the hero, feature it in a collection. |
| Investigate | High clicks, poor conversion. | Something breaks between interest and cart. Often a bad photo, a missing size, or a swatch color that does not match the product. |
| Retire | Almost no clicks over a long window. | It is taking up a slot in the row and shoppers are ignoring it. Consider dropping it from next season's range. |
Colors going cold#
Alongside the advice, Varn flags colors whose share of clicks is falling over the window. Early warning is worth more than a post-season report, because a color going cold in month two is a buying decision you can still change.
Self-optimizing order#
Turn this on in Style, Advance features and Varn quietly reorders each swatch row so colors shoppers click most drift toward the front.
How it behaves:
- Order is computed from your own click data and refreshed as it accumulates.
- Order is frozen for the length of a shopper's session. Chips never move under someone's finger, which would be worse than any ordering gain.
- Products with fewer than three values are left alone, because reordering two chips is not optimisation.
- The sort is stable, so equally-scored colors keep your original order.
Turning advice into a routine#
Once a week: look at sold-out demand#
The fastest path from this app to revenue. Anything with sustained sold-out clicks goes on the reorder list.
Once a month: read the advice card#
Act on Restock and Investigate. Sit on Feature and Retire until you have a full season.
Once a season: read the 90 day window#
That is the window that reflects a buying cycle. Compare what you bought against what shoppers clicked.
The honesty rule#
If there is not enough data, the app says so instead of showing a chart. There are no invented numbers, no projections presented as measurements, and no metric that exists to fill a card.