This essay sheds light on what is the product life cycle, delineates the stages of the product life cycle, elucidates how to significantly increase your product sales, and demystifies the challenges appertaining to significantly increasing your product sales. Succinctly stated, the product life cycle refers to the entirely of a product's life cycle which commences with the introduction stage and ends with the decline stage. The introduction stage is the foremost stage of the product life cycle in which the product is released into the market. The decline stage is the final stage of the product life cycle in which the product's sales precipitously decline. The product life cycle is the totality of stages that a product goes through which are not solely limited to the aforementioned stages of the product life cycle. The product life cycle shows how demand for a product is preordained to change overtime as the product goes through the stages of the product life cycle. A company should do everything in their purview to prolong the growth stage and the maturity stage of the product life cycle. Prolonging the growth stage and the maturity stage of the product life cycle will concomitantly decelerate the velocity at which the product will go through the product life cycle and reach the decline stage. Once a product has reached the decline stage of its product life cycle, it is inapt to be metaphorically hurled back into the growth stage of its product life cycle. If a product has reached the decline stage of its product life cycle and is succumbing to generating an infinitesimal product sales volume, then the product life cycle can be restarted if the product is re-released in the pending future and if it is forecast that there will be enormous customer demand for the product once the product has been re-released. Most products however will never experience a second product life cycle. A company would often prefer to release a new product than re-release an older product. Re-releasing older products is not conducive to innovating a product line. Companies can however innovate a product line by developing more innovative products for their product lines or by developing superior versions of existing products that offer significantly greater utility than the antiquated versions of their existing products. The duration of the product life cycle varies from product to product. Some products have an endless product life cycle since they can perpetually remain available for sale. It is possible for digital products, such as digital versions of songs, digital versions of video games, digital versions of movies, digital versions of software programs, and digital versions of courses to perpetually remain available for sale as long as the digital distribution platforms exist that render these products available for sale. It is advantageous to be able to develop products that can have an endless product life cycle since they can generate product sales decades after being released. In stark contrast to the endless product life cycle for digital products, the product life cycle ends for most tangible products when companies decide to discontinue their production runs to produce more units of a tangible product. Production runs to produce more units of a tangible product may be ceased in contexts in which the company believes that running another product run to procure more units of a tangible product will yield a negative return on investment. It can be expensive to conduct additional production runs to produce more units of a tangible product. If tangible products remain unsold, it can then yield steep inventory carrying costs. Production costs and inventory carrying costs can be enormous costs for companies to incur. It is appealing for companies to produce digital products since they not only do not bear inventory carrying costs to render them available for sale, but also have the latent potential to have an endless product life cycle. It is appealing for companies to produce digital products since orders for digital products do not bear any order fulfillment costs. Additionally, order for digital products can summarily automatically be fulfilled post the customers purchasing the digital products. It is however possible for a tangible product to have an endless product cycle in contexts in which it is printed on demand by a print on demand company shortly after being ordered by a customer via an online store on a print on the demand platform. A print on demand company is able to manufacture tangible products once orders for the tangible products have been placed by customers via an online store on a print on the demand platform. Print on demand companies are able to avert succumbing to inventory carrying costs and are able to preempt having an inventory surplus. Print on demand companies do need to carry inventory to render their tangible product offerings available for sale.
