This is a real audit, anonymised
Every number below was measured from a live storefront. Nothing here is illustrative. What we have removed is the store's name, the names of the real merchants it is compared against, and its product titles - we do not publish anything that identifies a merchant, including in our own marketing.
It is written to the merchant it was prepared for, so "you" throughout means them, not you.
Your copy names your store, lists your actual comparables, and names every product. Order one.
Pre-Holiday Benchmark Audit
An Apparel storefront, 291 products
Measured 04 August 2026 against the merchants who survived 2020-2026 in Apparel. Every figure below comes from your live storefront, not a model. Your category was inferred from your own product types rather than read from our index.
Before Black Friday: Check how much of your range is actually buyable.
71% of your products have no variant in stock. In apparel and footwear a high sold-out share is normal mid-season - but 207 products is a lot of storefront doing no work in Q4.
1 · Your own six years
Nobody else holds this. Every quarter we have tracked your storefront since 2019 - not a model, the actual observed values. your catalog went from 156 (2019 wk 41) to 291 measured live today, +87%; peaking at 878 (2022 wk 41) before you cut it back - a deliberate narrowing, which is what most surviving merchants in the study did not do; your average price moved $91.64 → $88.37 (-4%) across the series, against +29.5% of US inflation over the same span.
| Quarter | Products listed | Average price |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 wk 41 | 156 | $91.64 |
| 2020 wk 02 | 204 | $89.34 |
| 2020 wk 15 | 201 | $90.39 |
| 2020 wk 28 | 249 | $84.73 |
| 2020 wk 41 | 287 | $79.13 |
| 2021 wk 02 | 391 | $86.33 |
| 2021 wk 15 | 447 | $90.85 |
| 2021 wk 28 | 588 | $89.74 |
| 2022 wk 02 | 848 | $89.82 |
| 2022 wk 15 | 632 | $92.67 |
| 2022 wk 41 | 878 | $94.04 |
| 2023 wk 02 | 829 | $91.11 |
| 2023 wk 15 | 627 | $88.29 |
| 2023 wk 41 | 569 | $90.68 |
| 2024 wk 02 | 633 | $88.96 |
| 2024 wk 15 | 569 | $103.86 |
| 2024 wk 28 | 577 | $99.04 |
| 2024 wk 41 | 509 | $101.32 |
| 2025 wk 02 | 612 | $94.56 |
| 2025 wk 15 | 449 | $101.52 |
| 2025 wk 28 | 537 | $94.51 |
| 2025 wk 41 | 709 | $101.93 |
| 2026 wk 02 | 677 | $82.85 |
| 2026 wk 15 | 957 | $88.37 |
Quarterly points are snapshots of your storefront on that date, and the price column is an average across your catalog - the peer comparison below uses a median measured live, so the two are not the same statistic. The most recent row can lag what you list today.
2 · Where you sit among the merchants still trading
Not a category average - 272,806 surviving Apparel merchants, the ones still trading in 2026. You are priced below 36% of them and carry a wider range than 78% of them.
Your figures are measured from your live storefront today; the peer figures come from the storefront dataset the report is built on, where each store contributes its average price - so the price row compares your median against the median of peer averages. An average sits above a median on most catalogs, which makes this a conservative read of how you are priced. Treat the comparison as directional rather than decimal-exact.
| You | Surviving Apparel merchants (median) | |
|---|---|---|
| Median product price | $66.00 | $47.28 |
| Products listed | 291 | 70 |
The study's clearest finding on survival is that the merchants who made it through were not the cheapest ones. That is an association rather than a lever - but it is worth knowing which side of it you are on.
Your closest comparables
Matched on category, price, catalog size and business scale - real storefronts you can go and look at. We match on scale as well as shape where the data supports it: two stores can carry the same range at the same price and be different businesses entirely, and merchandising that works for one does not transfer to the other.
| Store | Products | Average price |
|---|---|---|
| Comparable A | 290 | $56.23 |
| Comparable B | 278 | $52.13 |
| Comparable C | 223 | $70.21 |
| Comparable D | 363 | $57.76 |
| Comparable E | 284 | $54.36 |
3 · Where your prices sit
Your median product price is $66.00. The matched-cohort benchmark for Apparel - the same stores measured in 2020 and 2026, priced by model - is $57.31, so you are 15% above it. This is a different comparison from the live peer median above, and the two will not match.
Your range runs $16.00 at the 10th percentile to $112.00 at the 90th - a 7× spread. That is a coherent range - shoppers landing anywhere in it see a consistent price story.
Across all DTC, merchants still trading in 2026 had priced 30% higher in 2020 than the population average. That is an association, not a lever - price stands in for brand, capitalisation and how serious the business was - but it is why being the cheapest merchant in a category is rarely the safe position it feels like.
4 · Whether your range is normal
You list 291 products against a matched-cohort benchmark of 170 for Apparel - broad for the category. (The live peer median above is measured on a different population; both are worth knowing.)
Those 291 products carry 2,829 variants - a median of 13 each. Product counts hide depth: two stores with the same catalog size can differ several-fold in how much there actually is to buy.
5 · How fresh is your range?
Skipped. Your storefront rewrites every product's publish date when it syncs - the whole catalog reports the same recent date - so publish dates carry no age signal here and we will not infer one from them. This affects roughly 5% of stores.
6 · What a shopper cannot buy - or find
207 of your 291 products (71%) have no variant in stock right now. That is not automatically a problem - in apparel and footwear a large sold-out share is normal mid-season. What matters is where it sits in your range, and whether shoppers can still find those products at all.
7 of 20 products we sampled are missing from your own search
We searched your storefront for 20 products drawn across your catalog. 7 of them did not come back - they are published, they have working URLs, but a shopper using your site search will not find them. Note this is not simply about stock: sold-out products elsewhere in your catalog are returned.
| Not found in your search | Stock |
|---|---|
| Product 65 | sold out |
| Product 273 | sold out |
| Product 216 | sold out |
| Product 50 | sold out |
| Product 161 | sold out |
| Product 43 | sold out |
Worth one pass before Q4: anything you want sold should be findable, and anything you do not should probably be unpublished rather than left as a URL-only page.
| Price band | Range | Products | Nothing in stock | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| bottom quartile | $3.00 - $35.00 | 73 | 56 | 77% |
| lower-mid | $36.00 - $66.00 | 73 | 62 | 85% |
| upper-mid | $70.00 - $100.00 | 81 | 48 | 59% |
| top quartile | $105.00 - $160.00 | 64 | 41 | 64% |
7 · What is genuinely abandoned
Stricter than out-of-stock: products with nothing buyable and no change to the record in over a year. A product someone is still managing gets touched - price, stock policy, copy.
Nothing abandoned - your catalog is clean
No dead listings, no products missing a price, no duplicate titles. That is worth knowing rather than assuming: across the storefronts in the study, the median store carries 1.6%, and it climbs past 5% for the largest catalogs. Whatever you are doing to retire products as they end is working, and it is the kind of housekeeping that quietly stops working when nobody is watching.
| Check | Products | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Abandoned (nothing buyable, untouched 1yr+) | 0 | 0.0% |
| No priced variant | 0 | 0.0% |
| Duplicate titles | 0 | 0.0% |
8 · How much there is to read
- 139 of your 291 products (48%) have under 200 characters of description - median 200. Search has little to rank, and an AI assistant summarizing your catalog has almost nothing to work with.
- 1 has no description at all.
- 7 products carry a single image and 0 carry none (median across your catalog: 5).
9 · What Google and AI assistants can read
We parsed the structured data on your 20 highest-exposure product pages (in-stock, ranked by price x variants, capped at two per product family so one range cannot dominate the sample; markup found: ProductGroup (20)). Structured data decides rich results and Shopping eligibility, and increasingly what an AI shopping assistant reads instead of rendering your page. Gaps found:
| Missing or empty | Pages |
|---|---|
| aggregateRating (star ratings in search) e.g. Product 281, Product 149, Product 285 | 20 of 20 |
| name e.g. Product 190 | 1 of 20 |
| hasVariant (declares variants, lists none) e.g. Product 190 | 1 of 20 |
Most of these are theme-level fixes rather than per-product work.
Your audit also comes with the full product list as a CSV, one row per product, so the fixes above become a working checklist. It is omitted from this sample.
10 · Sold-out products Google can still reach
207 of your 291 sitemapped products (71%) are sold out, so they keep earning organic landings. We checked 3 of those pages and every one offers a back-in-stock signup - you are handling this correctly. Keeping the URL indexed preserves its ranking for when stock returns, and the visit converts into an email instead of a bounce.
The gap is re-findability, not the landing: a shopper who arrives from Google, leaves, and later searches your own site for that product may not get back to it - see the search findings above.
Method and limitations are published in full. Category benchmarks are matched-cohort medians - the same stores measured in 2020 and 2026 - and their prices are modelled; everything measured on your storefront is observed. Your October re-run is included. If this audit did not surface three changes worth making, reply to the delivery email for a full refund.