How many products should you launch with

"I've got about forty things I could make. How many should I put in the shop?"

Five. The workable range is three to eight, and almost nobody who asks this question guesses low enough. A product costs you roughly 90 minutes of work before it earns a single pound, and that's before you buy any stock, so a launch of forty is sixty hours of unpaid setup spread across products you have no evidence anyone wants. Five products, properly photographed, priced and described, will out-sell twenty half-finished ones and take a fifth of the time to build.

If you're planning to use a free plan anywhere, there's usually a cap on it too. Sailo's is 10 products, and that number turns out to be a more useful constraint than it looks.

What a product costs before it earns anything

The stock is the visible cost. The rest is the one that eats your launch.

Job	Time, per product, done properly
Photograph it	25 minutes, once the setup exists
Write the description	20 minutes
Work out the price honestly	15 minutes
Work out and test the packing	20 minutes, per packing format
Sort out the listing, options, delivery	10 minutes

About 90 minutes. Call it an hour and a half of your life, per product, before a single order.

Five products: seven and a half hours. One good Saturday and a Sunday morning.

Forty products: sixty hours. That's a month and a half of evenings, and at the end of it you'll have forty listings, thirty of which will never sell anything, and no energy left for the part that actually generates orders, which is posting about them.

The cost you can't table is worse. Every product you list is a thing you have to keep in your head: whether it's in stock, whether the price is still right, whether the photos still match what you make now. Thirty of those is a job. Five is a shop.

Why a bigger launch sells less

Three mechanisms, all of them arithmetic rather than psychology.

Attention splits. Say you post four times a week. That's about 17 posts a month. With five products, each one gets talked about three times a month. With thirty products, each gets mentioned once every two months, which is functionally never. You cannot build a bestseller you don't mention, and you can't mention thirty things.

Money splits. If you have £400 to spend on materials, five products means £80 of stock each and enough depth to survive a good week. Thirty products means £13 each, which is one or two units. You will run out of your bestseller in week three while still holding £300 of the things nobody asked for. That isn't a stock problem, it's a launch-size problem, and it happens to almost everyone the first time.

Decisions split. A buyer landing on five products decides which one. A buyer landing on thirty decides whether to bother. The first decision ends in an order more often than the second one does.

There's a fourth thing that's harder to measure and probably matters most. A small shop that clearly does one thing is memorable. "She does the block-printed cushion covers" is a sentence someone can say to a friend. "She's got a shop with loads of stuff" is not.

The five slots

If five is the number, here's what each one should be doing.

1. The hero. The thing you're best at and would be happy making 200 of. This is what the shop is about and everything else supports it.

2. The near-neighbour. The same product in a different form: a bigger size, a different scent, a two-pack. It's cheap to add because the photography, packing and description are 80% shared, and it catches the buyer who likes the hero but wants something slightly different.

3. The entry price. The cheapest thing you'd be happy to sell. It exists so a nervous first-time buyer has a low-risk way to try you, and so that your hero looks reasonable next to it. Make it something that makes people come back rather than something that loses you money.

4. The bundle. Two or three of the above, boxed together, priced at a small discount. Bundles are the highest-margin thing most small shops sell, because the postage on two items in one parcel is barely more than the postage on one. This is the slot most people skip and it's usually the second-biggest earner.

5. The wildcard. The thing you're not sure about. This is your test slot, and it changes every couple of months until something sticks. If it does stick, it becomes a hero and something else becomes the wildcard.

You'll notice three of those five are variations on one product. That's deliberate. A launch of five products is not five separate businesses.

Variants are not products, and this matters for the cap

Before you count anything, get this distinction right, because it changes the number by a factor of ten.

One t-shirt design in four colours and five sizes is one product. It has 20 combinations, but it's one listing with two option sets on it. The same is true of a candle in three sizes, a bag in five fabrics, or a print in three paper stocks.

Sellers who think they need 60 listings usually need six. The rest is options, and putting them in as separate listings makes the catalogue unreadable and the stock impossible to track. Which photos have to be shot per variant and which can be shared is a real question with a practical answer, and it's covered in how to handle sizes and variants.

So when you hear "10 products", read it as "20 distinct things", not "10 items you can sell". For most makers that's a far bigger allowance than it sounds.

Where a 20-product cap genuinely bites

It bites in exactly three situations, and it's worth knowing which one you're in before you plan a launch.

One-of-one sellers. Vintage clothing, second-hand furniture, original art, restored electronics. Every item is its own listing because there's only one of it. Twenty is a rail of clothes, not a shop, and you'll be at the cap in a fortnight. If this is you, plan for a paid plan from the start and price it in as an overhead.

Food menus. A kitchen selling 30 dishes has 30 products, and none of them are variants of each other. Same for a grocery selling produce.

Spare parts and compatibility. If your buyer searches by model number, every model number is a listing.

Everything else, which is most handmade, most beauty, most clothing, most digital and every service business, fits inside 20 with room to spare. If you're not in one of those three categories and you're pressed up against a 20-product cap in your first three months, the honest read is that you've listed too many things, not that you've outgrown the plan.

How to choose the three or five

Four filters, applied in this order. Anything that fails one is out.

1. Can you make it again, this week, without checking anything? If the materials came from a one-off find, it's not a product. It's an item.
2. Would you be happy making 40 of it? Because if it works, you will. The thing you find fiddly and slightly annoying at unit three is unbearable at unit forty.
3. Does it survive the price arithmetic? Materials, your time at a real rate, overheads, failure rate, packaging, fees. If it doesn't leave a margin you can live on, it doesn't go in the launch. How to price what you make is the version of that calculation that includes the five costs people forget.
4. Does it photograph well? This is not vanity. A product that's hard to photograph is a product that's hard to sell online, and you will discover this after you've made 30 of them. Shoot a quick test photo of every candidate before you commit.

Then, from what survives, pick the ones that look different from each other in a grid. Four near-identical thumbnails read as one product and buyers scroll past all four.

Add on a schedule, not on impulse

The plan after launch is one new product a month, or one small drop a quarter. Not "whenever I feel like it", because whenever-you-feel-like-it means five new things in March and nothing until September.

A schedule does three things at once. It gives you a reason to post. It gives buyers a reason to come back and check. And it means each new product gets its own week of attention rather than being buried in a batch.

The other half of the schedule is deletion. Every time you add one, look at the bottom of the list and consider removing one. A product that's sold nothing in three months isn't waiting for its moment. It's occupying a slot and a fraction of your attention, and both are worth more than it is. The weekly reorder that keeps this honest is in building a catalogue people can scan.

Worked example: soap in Leeds, 32 ideas down to 5

Aisha makes cold-process soap in Leeds and sells at £6.50 a bar. She had 32 scent combinations written in a notebook and a plan to launch with 12.

Cold-process soap has a detail that makes the arithmetic unusually clear: it has to cure for four to six weeks before you can sell it. So every bar you make is money and shelf space committed a month and a half before it can earn anything.

Her numbers: a batch is 24 bars, unit cost £1.85 including the oils, lye, fragrance, the wrap and a share of her overheads.

The 12-scent plan. 288 bars, £533 of materials, and enough curing racks to fill a spare room for six weeks. She'd also have needed 12 sets of photographs, 12 descriptions and 12 labels designed, which is roughly 18 hours of setup.

What she did instead. Five scents. 120 bars, £222 of materials, one curing rack, seven and a half hours of setup.

In the first two months she sold 71 bars. Forty-four of them were one scent, a rosemary and charcoal bar that she'd nearly cut from the list because she thought it looked boring next to the pink one. Two scents sold four bars each in eight weeks.

So her third batch was 48 rosemary and charcoal, 24 each of the two that were moving, and nothing of the two that weren't. She dropped one of them entirely and made the other seasonal.

Had she launched with 12, she'd have had the same 71 sales spread thinner, £311 more of materials sitting in a spare room, and no clear signal about which one to double down on, because 71 sales across 12 products is noise and 71 across 5 is data.

The wasted-effort number is the one worth remembering: the seven products she didn't launch would have cost her about ten and a half hours of photography and listing, and would have generated, on the evidence, somewhere around eight sales between them.

When more than eight is genuinely right

Don't over-apply this. Some businesses need a big catalogue on day one.

A kitchen selling lunch needs a menu, and a menu with four things on it looks closed. A grocery needs the range because people shop by list. A parts seller needs every part. In Manila or Nairobi, a shop selling household goods over Facebook is expected to have breadth, because the buyer is comparing you to a market stall, and a market stall has depth.

The distinction is whether your buyer arrives wanting a category or a specific thing. Category shoppers need range. Specific-thing shoppers need clarity, and giving them range instead is how you lose them.

If you're in a range business, the answer isn't fewer products. It's better ordering and real categories, which is a different job.

The honest limitation

Sailo's free plan holds 10 products. That's a real cap, it isn't negotiable, and it will annoy you eventually.

The awkward thing to say, given we'd rather you paid us, is that most people reading this should not be anywhere near it in year one. Twenty distinct products, each properly photographed and described, is a serious catalogue. If you're hitting the cap in month two, the likeliest explanation is that you've listed variants as separate products or you've listed things you don't really sell.

When you do genuinely outgrow it, Pro is $19 a month for 100 products and Business is $49 for unlimited. If you're a one-of-one seller, you'll need one of those from the start, and that's a cost to build into your pricing rather than a surprise in month three.

One more thing to know before you plan around the free plan: it also keeps 7 days of analytics. Deciding which five products to keep wants more history than that, so if you're running lean, write your monthly totals down yourself. In 31 days the detail is gone and you'll be choosing from memory, which is the worst input available.

What to do next

Write down every product you're considering, then cross out anything you couldn't make again this week without checking a supplier. That single filter usually removes a third of the list.

From what's left, pick your hero: the one thing you'd be content making 200 of. Then build the other four around it using the slots above, and don't photograph anything until the five are chosen.

Set the whole thing up in one session against one background, so the grid looks like a shop rather than a folder. How to photograph what you sell is the two-hour version of that, and doing it once for five products is the difference between launching this month and launching in the spring.