Kill this SKU before it kills your margin
You might be keeping a bad product alive. Worse, you might be scaling it.
At Nord Media, we focus on profitable growth at scale, we help forecast revenue, and contribution margin goals, then build the marketing plans to execute those goals.
This means full clarity on testing, scaling and improving profitability at every aspect of your funnel.
If you want a growth partner aligned with your real business goals, let’s chat.
The hardest SKU to kill is the one that's still selling.
When you look at a 35% blended margin, you don't necessarily have a catalog where every product is performing at 35%.
Because buried inside that 35% margin could be:
• A $120 product that loses money on the first order but brings back excellent customers.• A $900 product that generates most of your contribution from the first purchase.• And a $39 product that's still selling, but quietly consuming inventory, ad spend and operational capacity without creating much value.
But your P&L rolls all three together.
And once everything gets blended into one number, it's very easy to put capital behind the wrong product.
Ecommerce brands go into BFCM with two traffic levers:
1. PAID
- Buy the clicks- Works instantly, scales with budget- Expensive, and never more than in November when every brand is in the same auction
2. OWNED
- Email and SMS to the list you already have- Reliable, high ROI- Capped at the people who already know you
The problem: one lever peaks in cost exactly when you need it most, and the other can't reach anyone new.
There's a third lever, and it's the one with the longest lead time:
3. SEARCH
- Deal hunters start googling weeks before Black Friday- The results Google trusts are pages with history- A BFCM page built in November competes against pages that have been earning rank for years
Most BFCM prep asks: "How much traffic can we buy in November?"
This lever asks: "How much traffic are we owed by November?"
And the best play is one permanent BFCM URL, revived and updated now, so it's indexed and ranking weeks before deal season.
If you don't know where your store stands on that lever, QCK's free SEO + CRO audit answers it for BFCM specifically: whether your deal pages have any search presence worth building on, and where the clicks you do win will leak once shoppers land.
The Trap Your P&L Sets
Take a fresh customer.
They buy your $39 entry product. Your CAC is $15. ROAS looks great.
So you put more money behind it.
But 90 days later, you discover that most of those customers bought once and disappeared.
Meanwhile, your $120 product required a $65 CAC. The media buyer thought that's too expensive and hated it.
But the customers who bought it came back twice, bought higher-margin products and generated far more contribution over the following months.
The $30 might be your best-seller but the $120 product is what actually brings profit to the business.
A blended P&L makes that difficult to see because profitable SKUs can quietly subsidize weaker ones.
Give Every Sku A Job
I would force every SKU into one of three roles.
1. Acquisition
This product's primary job is to acquire the right customer.
It can be acceptable for the first order to break even or even lose money if the cohort earns that investment back later.
So don't judge it primarily on day-zero ROAS.
Look at what those customers are worth at 60 and 90 days.
If customers acquired through the SKU come back and generate contribution, the initial loss can be intentional.
If they buy once and disappear, you're not acquiring valuable customers. You're buying revenue.
2. Profit
This product already makes money.
The job is contribution margin.
You don't casually discount it because the site needs another promotion.
You protect the economics because this is one of the products helping fund everything else.
3. Sunset
This product fails both tests.
It doesn't create a valuable cohort. It doesn't produce enough contribution.
There is no reason to keep feeding it budget because it happens to sell.
But there is an important exception here:
A $1,500 piece of furniture doesn't need a second purchase to be a great product.
If the first transaction produces strong contribution, that's enough.
A $30 consumable with weak first-order economics and no meaningful repurchase is a completely different problem.
The economics have to match the job.
The Exercise I’d Run This Week
Pull the full catalog and put one label next to every SKU.
• For acquisition candidates, ask what happens to customers who enter through this product at 60 and 90 days?
• For profit candidates, how much contribution does this product actually generate after its direct costs?
• For everything else, if the product isn't acquiring valuable customers or generating meaningful contribution, why are we still putting capital behind it?
This exercise matters because the scoreboard determines which product gets scaled.
If you judge every product on first-order ROAS, you'll naturally favor cheap products.
If you judge every product on repeat purchase, you'll undervalue products designed to be bought once.
If you judge everything on blended contribution margin, your strongest products can end up subsidizing your weakest ones.
What The Blend Is Hiding
The economics will make it even clearer to not judge every SKU the same way.
Across ecommerce, median contribution margin sits around 25%.
But that number hides a massive range.
Electronics can sit around 15%, while beauty and digital products can reach 45%+ in benchmark data. That's roughly a 3x difference in contribution economics between categories.
Then the second purchase changes the equation too. They can be 3–5x more profitable than first-purchase customers.
So a customer who looks mediocre after the first order can become highly valuable if they come back and purchase again, and that means a product with a higher CAC can be a better acquisition vehicle than the product with the cheapest CAC.
In your next weekly growth meeting, look at the individual category economics that’s hiding inside the first transaction.
Are you confident in your current structure and plan for Q4? There's still time to get things corrected to ensure you have a record breaking Black Friday. Every brand we onboarded during Q4 last year is still a client today and they're growing more profitable then ever.
Book a call and let's see how we can help get ready 👉 book a call with me.---Not ready for an agency but want some 1:1 support for Q4 prep? I'm on Mentorpass and offering 30% off my typical rates to help brands prepare for Q4. Let's chat
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