The Inside Scoop on Product Size, Price, and Sales
- Jason@DPD
- September 17, 2010
- No Comments
Here at DPD we maintain a content delivery and ecommerce network that delivers thousands of products. This generates a mountain of data on product sizes, product prices, sales volume, most popular product types, etc.
We’re serious about our privacy policy though, and we never share or sell sales information about any vendor or their product performance to 3rd parties. We do however use anonymous sales and product data to plan our infrastructure and future features to to provide the best possible service to our vendors.
This data includes things like product size, product price, product type (video, pdf, etc.), and how many sales they’ve had. This helps us gauge our storage and bandwidth requirements and is a crucial tool for us to make sure we have enough capacity to meet demand.
In this post we’d like to share a few of those anonymous product statistics with you for fun and informational purposes. For the sake of simplicity we’ll look only at products that are being sold in US Dollars (which accounts for the vast majority of DPD products).
Largest Products
First up, we’ll look at the top 10 largest products being delivered with DPD along with their price and how many times they’ve been purchased. As stated above, to keep this anonymous we’ve stripped all product names and IDs and we’re just looking at the raw size and transaction data.
| Size (MB) | Product Price | Purchase Count |
|---|---|---|
| 3141 | 49.00 | 122 |
| 2882 | 48.50 | 572 |
| 2882 | 97.00 | 2038 |
| 2882 | 48.50 | 58 |
| 2116 | 19.95 | 87 |
| 2048 | 67.00 | 58 |
| 2048 | 49.00 | 97 |
| 2025 | 29.00 | 421 |
| 1722 | 15.95 | 3 |
| 1695 | 39.95 | 11 |
Almost without exception these large 1, 2, and 3GB+ files are all video products. These might be training videos or independent films for example.
Before we make any determinations or correlations, lets look at a little more data.
Most Expensive Products
Next we’ll look at the top 10 most expensive products in our system. This table includes data for single item products, not any combos that might be made up of other collections of products at a higher price.
| Size (MB) | Product Price | Purchase Count |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | $4,795.00 | 1 |
| – | $1,000.00 | 20 |
| 2 | $999.00 | 1 |
| 1 | $995.00 | 1 |
| 2 | $699.00 | 97 |
| 3 | $500.00 | 1 |
| 70 | $499.99 | 1 |
| 1631 | $498.00 | 3 |
| 2 | $495.00 | 4 |
| – | $397.00 | 3 |
You’ll notice in this table that there are a couple products without a size. These are keycode products where the vendor is selling a software key, more than likely to activate a shareware or trail version of software or to unlock access to a subscription area on a website.
With one exception these most expensive products are all very small, which typically means the product is a PDF ebook, spreadsheet, or other non-multimedia document. You’ll also notice that the purchase count averages very low for expensive products.
Best Selling products
Finally, we’ll look at the data for the most popular products in the DPD system. These products are ordered by the number of sales, not the net sales amount.
| Size (MB) | Product Price | Purchase Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $4.99 | 4394 |
| – | $79.00 | 3454 |
| 5 | $39.95 | 3360 |
| – | $8.04 | 2982 |
| 3 | $29.00 | 2922 |
| 3 | $57.00 | 2619 |
| 1 | $10.00 | 2418 |
| 9 | $19.99 | 2199 |
| 2882 | $97.00 | 2038 |
| 11 | $25.00 | 1756 |
The thing we find most striking about this final table are the small product sizes. These files are almost all PDF products, scripts, small programs, website themes, or other non-multimedia products.
There is also a fairly wide range of product prices in this list- they range anywhere from $4.99 to $97.99. It’s interesting that the #2 product at $7.99 outsells the #4 product which is almost 1/10 the price. However, its important to take sales volume in to account when looking at pricing your own product.
For example:
4394 x $4.99 = $21,926.06
2982 x $8.04 = $23,975.28
1756 x $25.00 = $43,900.00
While cheaper products do tend to sell more copies, net income definitely favors the higher priced product.
Also, from looking at this information one might conclude that information products such as PDFs and other smaller products tend to sell more than large multimedia files like video. Of course, without knowing the specific products and their marketing efforts it would all just be conjecture.
You can see right off the bat why DPD can afford to give so much more product storage space compared to our competitors- while we do store many HUGE files, the most popular files in our system are relatively small, allowing us to average the total bandwidth and disk space costs and provide a better value to everyone. Number #9 on the list? We lose money on that guy every month. Thats ok though as long as everyone doesn’t have a wildly popular 2.8GB product 🙂
We’re developers here at DPD and we love analyzing raw technical and sales data. We’ve purposely left this post open to interpretation, and we’re interested in what you think.
Drop us a comment and tell us what conclusions you’ve come up with from looking at this data!