Your bestseller deserves a look. So does the product nobody has properly explained yet. Neither deserves the whole ad budget just because somebody likes it.
Choose ecommerce products to advertise by checking what each sale contributes, whether you can fulfill demand, and whether you have a convincing reason for a new customer to buy. Then run a bounded test. Revenue rank and margin percentage alone leave out too much.
Image: original ICONIC product photography shown in BPM’s creative portfolio. The examples and numbers in this article are hypothetical, not ICONIC performance data.
Start with dollars left per order
Calculate the money left before advertising after the expected discount, product cost, fulfillment, payment fees, shipping subsidy, and returns allowance. Use one consistent treatment of refunds so you do not subtract the same loss twice. Exclude sales tax collected for remittance from revenue available to spend.
Then decide how much must remain for overhead and profit. What is left is a planning ceiling for acquisition cost, not a promise that you can buy customers at that price.
Consider two single-product orders. Product A brings in $80 after discounts and leaves $32 after variable order costs. Product B brings in $50 and leaves $25. If the business requires $12 to remain from A and $10 from B after advertising, the planned acquisition ceilings are $20 and $15 respectively.
Product B has the higher contribution percentage before ads: 50% versus 40%. Product A still has more dollars available for acquisition. Which one deserves spend depends on whether actual acquisition costs fit those limits and whether the operational checks below pass.
These figures are illustrative. For multi-item baskets, account for the order’s full economics instead of assigning the entire purchase value to the product shown in the ad. Our ecommerce ROAS guide explains the relationship between margin and return targets.
Shopify’s profit reports depend on recorded product costs. Check that those inputs are complete, and understand which costs the report includes before treating its gross profit figure as money available for ads.
Check stock at the variant level
A product can be in stock while the version people want is unavailable. Look at sizes, colors, bundles, and shipping destinations. Send somebody through the exact buying path the ad will use.
Compare stock coverage with replenishment time and the demand you might create. Shopify’s inventory reporting can provide a historical sales-rate baseline. Adjust your planning for launches or promotions; yesterday’s pace is not a guarantee of tomorrow’s.
If you are clearing old stock, give that campaign its own objective and limit. A clearance decision can reasonably accept different economics from an ongoing customer-acquisition program. Mixing the two makes the next budget meeting harder.
Can the ad give someone a reason to care?
Write one sentence explaining why a person who has never heard of the brand should consider this product. If the sentence could describe every competitor, the brief needs more work.
A storage container might be easy to demonstrate: show what fits, how it stacks, or how the lid works. A supplement may need more explanation and careful support for its claims. A gift may depend on an occasion and a believable delivery date. Different products ask different things of the creative and the page.
Look for usable evidence: a clear demonstration, detailed product information, permissioned customer feedback, or a comparison you can substantiate. Attractive packaging helps the image; it does not settle the buying decision.
A product-selection worksheet for your next planning meeting
Create one row per candidate product or bundle and fill in these fields:
- Customer and occasion: Who is this for, and what prompts the purchase?
- Expected order economics: Net revenue, variable costs, required contribution, and planned acquisition ceiling.
- Supply: Sellable units by important variant, replenishment date, and fulfillment limitations.
- Buying evidence: Sales and conversion history, traffic source, return reasons, and what remains unknown.
- Creative idea: The buying reason, the evidence for it, and the asset needed to show it.
- Test: Budget cap, destination, audience, decision window, and the result that earns another test.
Mark each candidate “ready to test,” “needs work,” or “hold,” with the reason. Do not average away a serious problem. A strong margin cannot compensate for an unavailable product, and beautiful photography cannot fix an unsupported claim.
Give new products a fair test without inventing certainty
A bestseller may benefit from email, loyal customers, or people searching for it by name. A new product sent to cold traffic starts somewhere else. Raw conversion rates across those groups do not prove which product is better for acquisition.
Keep the test conditions as comparable as practical, record the differences, and allow enough time for the buying cycle. Use a pre-agreed budget limit rather than declaring a winner after one sale. Stop for a broken purchase path even if the test period is unfinished.
Future repeat purchases can justify a different acquisition target, but use observed customer cohorts and a payback period the business can fund. An optimistic lifetime-value estimate should not quietly become permission to lose money on every first order.
Bring the shortlist to your paid social team and, where relevant, your paid search team. The same product might need a demonstration in a feed and a precise answer to an existing search. The first decision is which product earns a test. Increasing its budget is a separate decision.
