Move Dead Stock on a Schedule — Without Giving Away Your Margin

The stock that quietly costs you money

Every store has it: the units that came in strong, sold well for a while, and then just… stopped. They sit on the shelf. They sit in the warehouse. They sit in your inventory value, tying up cash you could be spending on the products that actually turn.

The usual response is a manual firesale. Someone notices the pile, picks a discount out of the air, drops the price, and then forgets to move it again — so the item either sits at a mild markdown that never clears it, or gets slashed so hard it sells below what it cost you. Neither outcome is a plan. Both leak money.

There's a calmer way to handle it: decide the strategy once, set the floor you'll never cross, and let a schedule do the repetitive part.

Find the stock that's actually stuck

The first job is knowing what to clear. Not everything slow is a clearance candidate, and eyeballing a catalog of hundreds of SKUs isn't a strategy.

Clearance detection flags three plain, visible situations — and it shows you exactly why each item was flagged, so nothing is hidden:

• Aging — it's been on hand a long time and still hasn't sold through.
• Overstock — you're holding far more units than you'd normally carry relative to how you restock.
• Slow-moving — sell-through over the last couple of months is low while stock is still on hand.

You get a list, most urgent first, with the signals spelled out: how many days in stock, how many sold in the window, how deep the overstock is. It's a shortlist you can act on, not a hunch.

Detection only ever suggests. A product sitting in that list has had nothing done to it. No price has moved. It's a candidate, waiting for you.

Two numbers keep you in control

Before anything happens, you set two things on each plan.

The floor is the most important number in the whole feature. It's the lowest price you're willing to sell that unit for — your margin line in the sand. Once you set it, no step in the schedule will ever price below it. You can plan an aggressive markdown without ever waking up to a price you didn't intend, because the floor is enforced on every single step. A sensible default is offered — the higher of your unit cost or half the price — but the decision is yours.

The curve is how the price steps down over time. A step says "after this many days, take this percent off." A common shape is a gentle nudge first, then deeper cuts if it still hasn't moved — for example -10% after two weeks, -25% after four, -40% after six. Every discount is calculated off the original price, never stacked on the previous cut, and always clamped at your floor. You can make it faster, slower, shallower, or deeper — up to twenty steps — and the only rules are common-sense ones: days go up, discounts don't go backwards.

You approve; then it runs itself

Nothing moves a price until you approve the plan. That's the gate.

When you approve, the schedule captures the current sale price as its starting point and applies the first discount right away, so the markdown is live on your storefront immediately. From there, each later step takes effect on its scheduled day. You don't have to remember to come back and cut the price again — and you don't have to remember to change it back, either.

Two details make this trustworthy rather than nerve-wracking:

• Every step is logged. There's a running ledger of exactly when each markdown happened and the price it set. If anyone ever asks "why is this priced at this?", the answer is one glance away.
• A missed beat never costs you. If a scheduled check is ever delayed, the next one goes straight to the deepest markdown that's due — it never under-discounts, and it never applies the same step twice. Prices don't drift and they don't double-cut.

Changed your mind? Nothing is stuck

Clearance shouldn't be a one-way door.

Pause an active plan and the original price snaps back instantly — useful when full-price demand returns for a holiday and you want to hold the markdown for later. Re-approve when you're ready to continue.

Cancel ends the plan and restores the original price. No product is ever left stranded at a clearance price after its plan is gone. That guarantee matters: the thing merchants fear most about automated pricing is a discount that lingers after it should have ended, and this design simply doesn't allow it.

Who can pull the trigger

Managing clearance plans is a pricing task, so it takes the products permission. But approving a plan is the only action that moves real money, so it takes an additional finance permission — and it's recorded with the approver's name. A merchandiser can line up candidates and draft plans all day; it takes someone with finance authority to actually send a price down. Every approval, pause, and cancel lands in your audit log.

Where to start

Open the candidates list and look at the top three. Read why each was flagged. Pick the one that's been sitting longest, set a floor you're genuinely comfortable holding, and approve a modest three-step curve. Then leave it alone.

In a few weeks you'll have either cleared the stock or learned exactly what it takes to move it — with a full record of every step, and not a single unit sold below your floor. That's the whole idea: take the repetition off your plate, keep the decisions firmly in your hands.