How to Run a Weekly Merchandising Review Meeting for a Shopify Store: Agenda and Checklist

A 45-minute weekly merchandising review meeting for Shopify stores: who attends, the Shopify reports to prepare, a time-boxed agenda, a decision log template, a worked example and a solo-founder version.

A weekly merchandising review meeting is the habit that keeps a Shopify store's collection pages from going stale. In a physical shop, someone walks the floor every morning and notices that the window display is half sold out, the new stock is still in boxes and the bestseller is hidden at the back. Online, nobody walks the floor. Collection pages keep showing whatever order they were given weeks ago, sold-out products sit in the first row, and the new launch that cost a photoshoot sits on page three. A short, structured weekly review is the online version of walking the floor.

This guide gives you a complete format: who should attend, what to prepare from Shopify's own reports, a time-boxed 45-minute agenda, the questions to ask about each collection, a decision log that makes next week's meeting faster, a worked example, and a 20-minute version for a founder running the store alone. It is the routine we would set up for any D2C brand that has more than a handful of collections and nobody whose full-time job is merchandising.

Why weekly, and why a meeting at all

Monthly is too slow for most stores. Stock moves daily, campaigns launch weekly, and in India the calendar is crowded with festivals, wedding seasons and end-of-season sales that each change what should lead a page. Daily is too frequent for a meeting; that rhythm belongs to automation. Weekly is the point where enough has changed to be worth deciding on, and not so much has drifted that the decisions are emergencies.

Why a meeting rather than one person quietly fixing things? Because merchandising decisions sit across teams. Marketing knows which collections the ads point to. Operations knows which stock is about to land and which is stuck. The catalogue team knows which products are missing photos. The founder knows which range matters strategically. A collection page is where all of that meets, and a 45-minute weekly conversation is cheaper than the cost of each team optimising its own piece in isolation.

Who attends the merchandising review meeting

• The owner. One person runs the meeting, prepares the data and keeps the decision log. In a small brand this is often the founder or the e-commerce lead.
• Marketing or performance. They bring the campaign calendar and know which collections receive paid, email and social traffic this week.
• Inventory or operations. They know what is low, what is overstocked, what is arriving and what is delayed.
• Catalogue or content. They know which products are ready to feature, which lack photography or descriptions, and which are about to launch.

Keep it to four or five people. Anyone else can read the decision log afterwards. A meeting with ten attendees becomes a reporting session, which is the most common way this ritual dies.

Preparation: the data pack (30 minutes, one person)

The meeting is only as good as the preparation. The owner spends about half an hour before it pulling a short data pack, mostly from Shopify Analytics. These are the reports we would use, all named as they appear in Shopify's Help Center and reports library.

• Sessions by landing page, filtered or scanned for collection pages, to see which collections are where visits start and how that changed from last week.
• The conversion rate breakdown for the store, to confirm the leak is not at cart or checkout before blaming collection pages.
• ABC product analysis, which grades products by their share of revenue over the last 28 days: A products make up 80% of revenue, B products 15% and C products 5%, as Shopify defines it. These are the products whose placement matters most.
• Products by sell-through rate, to spot products selling through fast and those barely moving.
• Inventory remaining per product, which estimates how many days remain before stock runs out, to catch A products about to sell out and slow products with months of stock.
• Shopify's search reports, especially searches with no results, which point to missing products, missing collections or words your pages do not use.

Add two things that do not come from reports. First, screenshots of the top five collections on a phone, showing what a shopper sees before the first scroll. Second, the campaign calendar for the next two weeks. The whole pack should fit on one page or one shared sheet tab. If it runs to ten pages, nobody will read it and the meeting will drift into reading it aloud.

The 45-minute agenda

1. 1Last week's decisions (5 minutes). Read the decision log from last week. Was each action done? Is there any early sign of whether it worked? Unfinished actions are either carried forward with the same owner or dropped deliberately.
2. 2The numbers (10 minutes). Walk through the top five collections by landing sessions: visits, add-to-cart rate and conversion against last week and four weeks ago. Flag any collection that moved sharply in either direction and agree on a likely reason before moving on.
3. 3Stock (10 minutes). Go through the A products with fewer than 14 days of stock remaining, products with very low sell-through and lots of stock, and anything sold out that still appears in a first row. Operations says what is arriving and when.
4. 4The first-row walk (10 minutes). Look at the phone screenshots of the top five collections together. For each, ask: would we put these four to six products first if we were arranging the page by hand today?
5. 5The next two weeks (5 minutes). Marketing walks through upcoming campaigns, launches and dates. For each, which collection does the traffic land on, and is that page ready?
6. 6Decisions (5 minutes). Write down every decision with one owner and a date. Then stop on time.

The time boxes matter more than they look. Without them, the numbers section expands to fill the meeting, and the first-row walk, the part that actually changes what shoppers see, never happens.

Questions to ask about each collection

During the numbers and first-row sections, the same small set of questions works for almost every collection.

• Is anything in the first row sold out, or sold out in most sizes?
• Are the A products in this collection visible without scrolling, or buried?
• Is there a new product here that has had no fair chance at a visible position?
• Is there a slow seller with lots of stock that deserves a better position before it needs a discount?
• Does the page match where traffic is coming from this week? If an ad is promoting gifting, does the collection lead with gift-friendly products?
• Is any product here missing photography, a price, a description or proper variants, and should it be removed from view until it is fixed?
• Did a change we made last week hold, or has the order drifted?

The decision log

The decision log is the single most useful output of the meeting. It is a running sheet with one row per decision, never deleted, and it turns a weekly conversation into a record of what the store tried and what happened. The columns we use:

• Date of the decision.
• Collection or product affected.
• The change, in one sentence: 'Move the new linen co-ord sets into the first row of Summer Edit.'
• The reason: 'Launched last week, no visible position, strong add-to-cart rate from email traffic.'
• Owner: one name, not a team.
• Due date for the change.
• What we expect to happen and when we will check: 'Higher add-to-cart rate on Summer Edit; check in two weeks.'
• Outcome, filled in at the review date.

Two rules make the log work. First, one significant change per collection per week, otherwise you cannot tell which change did what. Second, every expected outcome gets checked. A log where the outcome column is always empty is a to-do list, not a learning system. If your store has access to notes in Shopify Analytics, adding a dated note when a change goes live makes the before-and-after easier to read in reports later.

Worked example: one week at a jewellery and accessories brand

Here is how a single meeting might run for a D2C brand selling gold-plated and silver jewellery, about 350 products and 20 collections. The figures are illustrative, to show the reasoning rather than to set benchmarks.

• Last week's decisions: the team moved three new oxidised silver jhumkas into the first row of Earrings. Add-to-cart rate on the collection is up a little; too early to call. Keep and review next week.
• Numbers: Earrings and Gifts for Her are the top landing collections. Gifts for Her conversion dropped noticeably against four weeks ago. Marketing points out that a new Instagram campaign sends colder traffic there, which may explain part of it.
• Stock: two A products, a pair of pearl drops and a layered chain, have under 10 days of stock remaining. Operations says a restock of the chain lands in 12 days; the pearl drops are not being remade. A silver cuff has 140 units and a low sell-through rate.
• First-row walk: the pearl drops lead Gifts for Her. On a phone, the first row also shows a sold-out ring. The silver cuff is at position 31 in Bangles.
• Next two weeks: a wedding-season gifting email goes out next Thursday, linking to Gifts for Her.

Decisions, each with one owner: remove the sold-out ring from the first row of Gifts for Her today; keep the pearl drops featured, since there is no restock and they should sell through, but stop paid promotion of them once stock falls below 10 units; move the silver cuff into the top eight of Bangles for two weeks and check whether its sell-through improves before considering a discount; rework the first row of Gifts for Her for the wedding email, leading with in-stock pieces under ₹2,500, by Wednesday. Four decisions, four owners, four check dates, and the meeting finished on time.

Monthly and quarterly extensions

Some reviews do not need to happen weekly. Add them to the first meeting of each month or quarter, with extra time.

• Monthly: look at the decision log outcomes for the month. Which kinds of change worked, and which did not? Check the tag list for stray or expired campaign tags, and review storefront filters on your largest collections.
• Monthly: check the bottom of the ABC analysis. C products with high stock are candidates for better placement, bundling or clearance; C products with no stock and no restock planned may simply need archiving.
• Quarterly: review collection descriptions and page titles for your top collections, especially any seasonal copy that has gone out of date.
• Quarterly: look at the collection list itself. Are there collections nobody lands on and nobody links to? Are shoppers searching for a range you have no collection for?
• Before each major season: run a dedicated session on the festival or sale calendar, two to six weeks ahead, so every campaign has a ready collection page.

The solo-founder version: 20 minutes

If you run the store alone, the same ritual works in miniature. Block 20 minutes at the same time each week, ideally early in the week before campaigns go out.

1. 1Five minutes: check last week's two or three decisions and write down whether they happened and what you see.
2. 2Five minutes: open Sessions by landing page and Inventory remaining per product. Note your top three collections and any bestseller with less than two weeks of stock.
3. 3Five minutes: open your top three collections on your phone. Fix anything sold out in the first row immediately.
4. 4Five minutes: decide one or two changes for the week, write them in the log with a check date, and stop.

The log matters even more for a solo founder, because there is nobody else to remember what was tried in March.

Anti-patterns that kill the meeting

• Turning it into reporting. If most of the time is spent reading numbers aloud, send the data pack in advance and start with decisions.
• Changing everything at once. Ten changes to one collection in a week teach you nothing about which of them worked.
• Reacting to one day. A single bad Tuesday is noise. Compare weeks, and compare with four weeks ago.
• Deciding by seniority. The most senior person's favourite product is not automatically the right first-row choice. Ask what the numbers say, then apply judgement on top.
• No owner. 'Marketing will look at it' means nobody will. One name per decision.
• No follow-up. If last week's decisions are never reviewed, the meeting has no memory, and people stop taking its decisions seriously.

Honest trade-offs

• The meeting costs real time: 45 minutes for four people plus 30 minutes of preparation every week. For a store with five collections and one channel, the solo version is enough.
• Shopify's reports describe sessions, orders and stock, not how shoppers interact with each position on a collection page. The meeting supplies the judgement those reports cannot.
• Manual changes decided in the meeting go stale by the following week as stock and demand move. A weekly meeting is good at decisions; it is a poor way to keep an order current day to day.
• The value compounds slowly. The first few meetings feel like overhead. The return shows up after a couple of months, when the decision log starts telling you what kind of change actually works for your store.

A weekly merchandising review meeting checklist

• One owner, four or five attendees, the same time every week.
• Data pack prepared beforehand: landing sessions, conversion breakdown, ABC analysis, sell-through, days of stock remaining, search terms with no results, phone screenshots and the campaign calendar.
• Time-boxed agenda: last week, numbers, stock, first-row walk, next two weeks, decisions.
• One significant change per collection per week.
• Every decision logged with one owner, a due date, an expected outcome and a check date.
• Outcomes reviewed every week and summarised every month.
• Quarterly reviews of descriptions, titles, tags, filters and the collection list itself.

Let software do the daily work, and the meeting do the thinking

The weakest part of any manual merchandising routine is the gap between meetings. You decide on Monday that in-stock bestsellers should lead a collection, and by Thursday two of them have sold out and a new product has started converting well. A weekly meeting cannot keep up with that, and should not try.

That is the split we designed SellRank around. SellRank, our Shopify collection-sorting app, turns the meeting's decisions into rules that keep running. You describe a collection as percentage slots, for example the first 20% in-stock bestsellers and the next 20% new arrivals, preview the exact order, pin or demote products by hand, and sync it into Shopify's own manual sort. On the Grow plan and up, it re-sorts daily or weekly in your store's time zone, publishes and reverts campaign orders on the dates you set, keeps every published order as a version with daily views, carts, orders and revenue attributed to it, and runs an hourly sort-health check that flags any collection whose order has drifted. That turns the 'did last week's change work?' item on the agenda from a debate into a look at the numbers.

If you want your weekly meeting spent on decisions rather than rearranging tiles, see SellRank at /products/sellrank. The free plan covers one collection with the full editor, live preview and one live sync, which is enough to try it on the collection your meeting talks about most.