We’re retiring 14 long-tail SKUs in Q1 after three straight quarters under 0.5% sales share, and I’m proposing a 60-day EOL plan that pairs inventory burn-down with guided migration to two higher-margin bundles. If you’ve run this, did coordinated CX/Marketing comms plus a feature-flagged auto-substitution flow keep churn and NPS stable, or did a staged price-step with opt-in upgrades perform better?
We kept NPS flat sunsetting 9 SKUs by feature-flagging auto-sub with a 15% holdout, a first-cycle price lock, and an in-app banner from the PM instead of Marketing. Small caveat: B2B buyers hated surprises — send a 30-day “equivalent or better” pledge, allow a one-cycle opt-out, and auto-refund any price delta so it doesn’t feel like a mystery box swap.
But 60-day EOL worked; ‘auto-substitution’ plus first-cycle price lock kept churn flat; cap coupon stacking…
In a 60-day EOL we ran last year, the biggest lift came from mapping retiring SKUs to the two replacement bundles in site search and on PDPs with a “This item’s retiring — move to Bundle A” nudge, which drove about 18% more self-serve migrations and cut tickets. If you go feature-flagged auto-sub, watch mixed carts — we had to block discount stacking when a sunset SKU and a bundle showed up together to keep totals sane.
We got the best results by adding a tiny “what changes” compare step in the migration flow (price, features, next bill date) and mirroring it in the renewal email; it cut tickets about 25% and kept NPS steady during a Q1 sunset mapped to two bundles. Small caveat: if your 14 SKUs have edge-case features, include one line of “won’t carry over” to preempt CX escalations.