Key takeaways
Get your best seller out of your prospecting ads.
Okay, maybe not every time. But if it is not the product driving new customer acquisition at the lowest friction point, why is it eating your prospecting budget?
Here is the uncomfortable part: you probably cannot answer that. The two updates we have just shipped to Fabrik Intelligence exist so you can.
Same number, opposite decisions
Blended metrics hide it. A product with a strong ROAS might be earning it from customers who already know the brand. They found the ad familiar, and they would have bought through email anyway. On paper it looks like your ad account's hero. In reality it is being subsidised by loyalty.
Or it might genuinely be your gateway product, the one opening relationships at the lowest friction point. In which case it deserves more budget, not less.
Same number on the dashboard. Opposite decisions. Most reporting cannot tell you which one you are looking at.
Dynamic product ads compound the problem. Meta and Google feeds optimise toward conversion volume, and returning customers convert more easily, so the algorithm keeps pushing the products your existing customers love. The feed ends up doing retention work with acquisition budget.
We hold a firm view on this: paid marketing should be judged on the new customers it brings in. Retention belongs to email, CRM and the brand experience. If your product feed cannot tell the difference, neither can your budget.
One catalogue, the number that settles it
The first update is a central product catalogue that combines Shopify sales data with marketing data in one view: spend, ROAS, click-through rate, CPC, and new versus returning customer acquisition at product level.
Every product now gets scored on the number that settles the argument: what percentage of its buyers are new to the brand.
A product with a high new-customer share is an entry product, a gateway. It opens relationships and deserves prospecting budget. A product bought overwhelmingly by returning customers is a trust product. People buy it once they already know the brand, which makes it the wrong thing to lead with in cold audiences and exactly the right thing for retargeting and email.
Our scoring system understands that distinction natively. It knows whether the objective for a given product is acquisition or reactivation, which removes friction from the product feed before a single campaign setting changes.
The price of the first product matters more than you think
Building the catalogue surfaced a finding worth sharing. Across the accounts we manage, new-customer click-through rate, bounce rate and conversion rate correlate directly with the price of the first product a cold audience sees.
Lead with a premium piece, even a best seller, and the click-through weakens, the bounce climbs, and the conversion follows. Too expensive as a first touch point introduces friction. Every time.
Meet the same customer with an accessible entry product and every number moves the other way.
That does not mean discounting your way to growth. It means being deliberate about which product opens the relationship. The premium piece still sells. It just sells second, to someone who now trusts you.
The feeds inherit the logic automatically
Knowing which products acquire is only useful if the ad platforms know it too.
Because the scoring lives in the catalogue, it flows straight into how we build and prioritise product feeds. Gateway products get prospecting budget in DPAs and Google Shopping campaigns. Trust products get held back for retargeting audiences and lifecycle campaigns where they belong.
No manual feed surgery, no spreadsheet exports, no rules that break the moment the range changes. The catalogue holds the logic and the campaigns inherit it. For a brand heading into peak season, that is the difference between a Q4 feed that chases revenue and one that builds a customer base you still own in January. We covered the wider planning picture in our Q4 playbook for fashion brands.
Bundles built from two years of your own orders
The second update is bundles and merchandising. As an official Shopify app, Fabrik Intelligence can read two full years of historic order data, which is enough to see genuine purchase patterns rather than seasonal noise.
The platform identifies which products are frequently bought together, then pushes those pairings automatically to a metafield in Shopify. From there, your existing upsell components pick them up: on the PDP, in the cart drawer, and at checkout if you are on Shopify Plus.
No third-party apps. No scripts slowing the storefront down. No additional cost. Just your own trading data feeding back into your own store, in a format you can action any way you want.
This is the part we think matters most: the data does not stay in a dashboard. It lands in the theme, where it earns AOV on every session.
For merchandisers and trading teams
The catalogue is not only an advertising tool. It gives merchandisers and trading teams product-level visibility on size curves and colour performance, so trading actions can be planned on evidence rather than instinct.
That matters because holding the wrong stock is expensive. Carrying costs typically run at 20 to 30 percent of inventory value per year once storage, capital and obsolescence are counted, and fashion sits at the sharp end of that range because styles age fast.
Knowing early that a size is breaking or a colourway is stalling means rebuying the depth that sells and clearing the depth that will not, before it becomes warehouse stock you are paying to keep. Healthy stock depth on the right lines, less cash buried in the wrong ones.
Cohorts and a cleaner platform
Alongside the two headline updates, this release adds new customer cohorts and new versus returning splits across the platform, so the acquisition lens applies to more than the catalogue.
The whole platform has also had a visual refresh. It is faster to read, easier to navigate, and the numbers a trading meeting actually needs sit closer to the surface.
Where this goes next
Most fashion brands plan spend by revenue rank and hope. The ones pulling ahead know each product's acquisition role: they spend to open relationships and let retention channels harvest them.
That shift needs product-level truth about who is buying, at what price point, for the first time or the fifth. It is now sitting in the catalogue, wired into the feeds and the storefront, doing its work on every session.
Do you know your products' acquisition roles?
