Dead stock calculator
See how much cash is stuck in products that do not sell, what keeping them costs every month, and whether clearing them now beats waiting. Free, no signup.
Use what you paid per unit, not the sales price. For several products, enter the totals: all units and their average cost.
Storage, capital, insurance, handling, shrinkage. 20 to 30% is a common estimate.
Your honest estimate. If it may never sell, try 24.
What you could get now with a discount, bundle or sale to a liquidator.
In your currency, at what you paid for the goods.
- Carrying cost per month
- 125
- Carrying cost per year
- 1,500
- Cost of waiting the months you entered
- 1,500
- Recovered by clearing now
- –
- Clearing vs waiting
- –
Which of your products are dead stock?
ReorderSheet lists the slow sellers in your Shopify store with the date of the last sale and, if you add unit costs, the cash tied up in each, next to a reorder list for the products that do sell. From the CSV exports you already have. $29 once, runs in your browser, files are never uploaded.
What counts as dead stock
Dead stock is inventory that has not sold for a long time and is unlikely to sell at full price. Common thresholds are 90, 180 or 365 days without a sale. Seasonal products need a longer window than everyday items, so judge them against the last season, not the last 90 days.
How the calculator works
Clearing makes sense when what you recover now, plus the carrying cost you stop paying, is more than you would realistically get by waiting. Waiting only pays if the product will actually sell at full price in that time.
Worked example
400 units at a cost of 15 have not sold for six months. Carrying cost is 25% a year.
- Cash tied up: 400 × 15 = 6,000
- Carrying cost: 6,000 × 25% ÷ 12 = 125 per month, 1,500 per year
- If the stock might sell at full price in 12 months, waiting costs 1,500 on top of the risk that it does not sell at all.
- Clearing at 12 per unit recovers 4,800 now and stops the 1,500 holding cost.
Finding dead stock in Shopify
- Export your orders and inventory as CSV and look for SKUs with stock on hand and no sales in your chosen window.
- Shopify Analytics also has reports on sell-through and days of inventory remaining, depending on your plan.
- Sort by cash tied up, not by units. Twenty expensive items can matter more than five hundred cheap ones.
What to do with it
- Bundle it with bestsellers or offer it as a free gift above an order value.
- Run a clearance collection or sell to a liquidator.
- Stop reordering it, and check why it was overbought so the next order is smaller.