How to know which product to push

You've got fourteen products and you post about whichever one you photographed most recently. Some months one of them sells well and you can't say why. Some months none of them do.

Rank them by profit per hour of your time, push the winner for four weeks straight, and ignore the rest while you do it.

That's two decisions, and both are usually made wrong. The ranking gets made on revenue or on gut feel, which hides the actual winner. And the pushing gets spread across everything, which means no product ever gets enough repetition for anyone to remember it. A shop that posts fourteen products once each in a month has said nothing fourteen times.

The table that fixes the first decision takes about twenty minutes to build. Here's how.

The three wrong ways to pick

Your favourite. The one you're proudest of making. It's almost never the one that sells, because you value the difficulty and the buyer values the result.

The newest. Recency isn't evidence. Pushing whatever you last made means your best-performing product gets less attention every month it stays in the catalogue.

The highest price. Revenue per sale is the most misleading single number in a small shop. A ₱1,450 product that sells twice is worse than a ₱780 product that sells eleven times, and it's much worse once you count what each one costs you to make.

The number that decides it

Not revenue. Not margin percentage. Total contribution, divided by the hours it takes you.

Contribution per unit is the price minus everything that varies with the unit: materials, packaging, payment fees, and the delivery cost if you're absorbing any of it. Not rent, not your phone bill, not the subscription. Just the costs that exist because you made and sent that one thing.

Then multiply by units sold to get total contribution, and divide by the hours those units took. Now you have the only number that matters, which is what an hour of your labour earns on each product line.

Build this table. One row per product, and be honest about the last column.

Column	Where it comes from
Price	Your listing
Unit cost	Materials plus packaging plus fees
Contribution per unit	Price minus unit cost
Units sold, last 90 days	Your order records
Total contribution	Contribution times units
Minutes per unit	Time yourself for one, honestly
Profit per hour	Total contribution divided by total hours

The minutes column is the one nobody adds and it's the one that flips the ranking. Something that takes four hours and makes ₱600 of contribution earns you ₱150 an hour. Something that takes twenty minutes and makes ₱310 earns you ₱930 an hour. On a revenue chart the first one looks like your business. It isn't.

If your costing isn't solid, do that before this, because every number above depends on it and most small sellers undercount their materials by a third. How to price what you make is the prerequisite.

If you have no sales history

Year-one problem, and it's real. You can't rank on units sold when there are barely any.

Use the next-best signals, in this order:

1. Questions. Which product do people ask about most in DMs and comments? Questions are demand that hasn't converted yet, and they're a stronger signal than likes because asking costs effort.
2. Saves and shares, if your platform shows them. Someone saving a post is closer to buying than someone liking it.
3. What people mention unprompted. "Do you still make the green one?"
4. What you'd sell to a stranger if you had one shot. Your instinct here is worth more than you think, as long as you're picking for the buyer rather than for yourself.

Then test rather than commit. Push one product for two weeks and count enquiries, then push another for two weeks. Two weeks is enough to see a difference and short enough that you haven't wasted a season. If you're still at the very start of this, the volume comes first and getting your first ten orders is the sequence for that.

The hero and the ladder

Once you know your winner, the catalogue around it has a job.

The entry product. Cheap enough to be an impulse, good enough to prove you. Its purpose is to make someone a customer, not to make money. A small version, a sample, a single instead of a set.

The hero. The one you push. Best profit per hour, easy to explain, photographs well, doesn't need a size chart or a conversation.

The anchor. The expensive one. Most of its value is that it makes the hero look reasonable, and it does that job while sitting there selling twice a year.

The mistake is treating all three as equally worth promoting. The entry product doesn't need pushing, it needs to be visible at the moment of hesitation. The anchor doesn't need pushing at all.

There's also a case where the best product to push isn't the most profitable one. If a cheap product reliably turns strangers into customers who then buy the expensive one, that's a gateway, and its value is in the second purchase rather than the first. You can only see that by tracking who bought what, second, and that's the sort of thing how to read your own numbers is for.

What "pushing" actually means

Not posting about it more. Putting it in every place a decision gets made, for four weeks, without variation.

The full list:

• The pinned post. Whatever's pinned is what a new visitor sees first. Most sellers have something from January pinned.
• The first line of your bio. Name the product and the price. Not your values.
• The first product on your shop page. Order matters. People do not scroll as far as you think.
• The first message. When someone asks a general question, your answer mentions the hero specifically.
• The packing note. Every parcel that goes out carries a line about it.
• Eight to twelve posts across the month. Different angles on one product: made, worn, packed, compared, a customer's photo, the thing it fixes.

That last point is the one people resist. Posting about the same product twelve times in a month feels repetitive to you because you've seen all twelve. Your audience saw maybe three, and the third one is where recognition starts.

Four weeks, one product. Then measure, then decide whether to keep going or switch.

Joy's bags, in Cebu

Joy makes beaded bags in Cebu. She had eleven products, sold through Instagram and Facebook, mostly paid cash on delivery with some GCash transfers, about 25 orders a month.

Her instinct was that the large woven tote at ₱1,450 was her main product. It was her most expensive, it got the most compliments, and it was the one on her profile picture.

Then she built the table, for 90 days:

Product	Price	Unit cost	Units	Contribution	Mins each	Profit/hour
Large woven tote	₱1,450	₱610	9	₱7,560	240	₱210
Beaded pouch	₱780	₱250	34	₱18,020	55	₱578
Phone sling	₱620	₱190	12	₱5,160	45	₱573
Keyring	₱180	₱55	41	₱5,125	12	₱625
Other 7 products			19	₱6,300

The tote she'd built her whole shop around earned her ₱210 an hour. The pouch earned nearly three times that and did more than twice the total contribution.

The keyring had the best hourly rate of all, which is the sort of result that tempts people into the wrong conclusion. It's an entry product, not a hero. At ₱180 it can't carry the shop no matter how efficient it is, and it can't absorb delivery. But it turned out that 14 of the 34 pouch buyers had bought a keyring first, which makes it the most valuable ₱180 in her catalogue.

So she pushed the pouch. Four weeks, pinned post, bio, first thing on the shop page, ten posts, a line on every packing note. The next 90 days: 61 pouches instead of 34.

The unglamorous detail: she also stopped making the tote to order and moved it to a two-week lead time. Three people were annoyed. It freed roughly 20 hours a month, which she spent making pouches, which is where the extra 27 sales physically came from. Pushing a product you can't make more of is just a longer queue.

The products to quietly retire

Look at the bottom of your table. There's usually a cluster of products that sell one or two units a quarter, take up a listing slot, and cost you attention every time you think about the catalogue.

Retire them. Not with an announcement. Just stop restocking, mark them sold out, and remove them at the end of the season.

Two exceptions worth keeping. A product with terrible numbers that photographs beautifully and brings people in is doing a marketing job, so keep it if you can prove that's happening. And a product one specific good customer buys regularly is worth keeping for them, quietly, off the main catalogue.

Everything else goes. A shorter catalogue converts better because a buyer facing eleven options makes no decision, and building a catalogue people can scan is about exactly that problem.

How to tell whether the push worked

Set the measurement before you start, not after, or you'll rationalise whatever happened.

Three things to write down on day one: units of the hero sold in the previous four weeks, total orders in the previous four weeks, and enquiries about the hero specifically.

Then compare the same three at the end. What you want to see is the hero's units up and total orders up. If the hero's units went up and total orders stayed flat, you moved demand around inside your own catalogue rather than creating any, which is worth knowing and isn't a disaster if the hero has a better margin.

Give it four weeks minimum. A week is noise. If you sell fewer than about ten orders a week, give it six, because at low volume a single quiet week can look like a trend and isn't.

Two limits worth naming

Sailo's free plan caps you at 10 products. That's usually described as a limitation and for this particular job it's closer to a favour, because almost every small shop with 40 listings would sell more with 12. If you genuinely need more than 20, Pro gives you 250 and Business is unlimited, but check your table first. The number of products that earn under ₱1,000 of contribution a quarter is normally larger than anyone wants to admit.

The real limitation is history. On free, analytics go back 7 days, which isn't long enough to rank products by anything meaningful. Ninety days is the minimum useful window and a year is better. Pro holds a year, Business holds three. If you're on free, you'll need to build the table from your own order records rather than from a dashboard, which is the honest answer and also what most sellers end up doing anyway.

Build the table this week

Open a spreadsheet. One row per product, and fill in price, unit cost and units sold from whatever records you have, even if the records are WhatsApp threads.

Then do the part everyone skips: time yourself making one unit of each of your top three, with a stopwatch, no estimating. The number will be higher than you think and it will probably change which product you push.

Pick the winner on profit per hour. Pin it, put it first, and don't post about anything else for four weeks.