Clearance & Markdown Scheduler

Overview

Dead stock ties up capital. The Clearance & Markdown Scheduler helps you move it — deliberately, on a schedule, and inside a price floor you control.

It works in three clear stages, and you stay in charge of every one:

Detection flags products that look like clearance candidates — aging, overstocked, or slow-moving — and shows you the plain reason it flagged each one. Detection only ever suggests. It never changes a price.
You review and approve. Nothing moves until you approve a plan. On approve, the scheduler captures the current sale price as the plan's base and applies the first discount immediately.
A scheduled step-down walks the price down along a curve over the following weeks — always inside the hard floor you set — and records every step in an audit log. Cancel or pause at any time and the original price is restored.

The price the scheduler writes is the same one checkout charges, so an approved plan takes effect on your live storefront right away.

How detection works

Detection uses plain, visible rules — you see exactly why each item was flagged, and you can read the signals on every candidate:

Aging — stock that has been on hand a long time and still hasn't sold. By default, items older than 45 days with units still on hand.
Overstock — far more units on hand than you'd normally carry. By default, on-hand at or above 3× the product's reorder point, or 50 units when no reorder point is set.
Slow-moving — low sell-through over the lookback window. By default, one unit or fewer sold per week (over a 60-day window) while stock is on hand.

Candidates are sorted with the most urgent first. Detection skips products that already have a live plan, near-free items, and anything with no stock, so the list stays actionable.

For each candidate, the scheduler suggests a starting floor and a markdown curve — but both are just starting points you can edit before you approve.

The floor: your margin line in the sand

Every plan has a hard floor in your store's currency. No step in the schedule will ever price a unit below it. That is the single most important number on the plan, so set it with intent.

The suggested floor defaults to the higher of your unit cost (if known) or 50% of the base price.
You can set the floor to any value from zero up to the current sale price. It can never exceed the base price.
Discounts always apply to the captured base price — they never compound on an already-discounted price — and the result is clamped at the floor.

Because the floor is enforced on every step, you can schedule an aggressive curve without risk of a step landing below the price you're willing to accept.

The markdown curve

A curve is an ordered list of steps. Each step says: after this many days from the start, take this percent off the base price. The default suggested curve is:

-10% after 14 days
-25% after 28 days
-40% after 42 days

You can edit the curve freely before you approve — up to 20 steps. Two rules keep it sensible, and the scheduler enforces them:

Days must strictly increase from one step to the next.
The discount must not decrease as days increase — later steps are always the same or deeper.

When the last step is reached, the plan ends on its own and simply holds the final (floored) price. It does not keep discounting.

Step-by-step: putting a product on clearance

Open the Clearance & Markdowns area and switch to the candidates view to see what detection has flagged, along with the signals for each item. You can also start a plan manually for any product.
Pick a candidate. Review its reason and signals.
Set the floor. Confirm the suggested floor or type the lowest price you're willing to accept.
Adjust the curve if you want a faster or slower step-down, or different depths.
Save the plan. At this point it is suggested — still just a draft. No price has changed.
When you're ready, approve it. Approving captures the current sale price as the base, sets the plan active, and applies the first step immediately.
From here the scheduler advances the plan on its own as each step's day arrives.

What happens after you approve

The scheduler checks active plans roughly once an hour. When a step becomes due, it writes the new price.
If a check is ever missed, the next run jumps straight to the deepest step that is due, so a delay never leaves a price under-discounted or skips a markdown you were owed.
Every applied step is written to a step log with the exact price it set. That log is your audit trail — you can see precisely when each markdown happened and what it charged.
Applying a step is idempotent: even if a check runs twice, a given step is only ever applied once. Prices are never double-marked.

Pausing, cancelling, and editing

Pause an active plan to stop the step-down and immediately restore the original base price. The plan parks in an approved (not started) state; re-approving restarts it from the first step.
Cancel a plan to end it and restore the original base price. No product is ever left stuck at a clearance price after its plan is gone.
Edit a plan's curve, floor, base, or reason while it is still suggested or approved. To change an active plan, pause it first, edit, then re-approve.
Delete applies only to a plan that never went active. For anything that started moving prices, cancel it instead so the price is restored.

Permissions and the audit trail

Creating, editing, and managing plans requires the products permission.
Approving a plan is the only action that moves real prices, so it additionally requires the finance permission. Approvals are recorded with the approver's identity.
Approve, pause, and cancel are all written to your account's audit log, alongside the per-step markdown ledger. Between the two, every price change from a clearance plan is fully accounted for.

Tips

Start conservative on the curve and aggressive on the floor. You can always deepen the curve later; you can't un-sell a unit you gave away below cost.
Set an accurate reorder point on your products. Overstock detection uses it, so a good reorder point means better clearance suggestions.
Use pause when you want to "hold" a promotion — for example, over a holiday when full-price demand returns — then re-approve when you want the step-down to continue.

Gotchas

The floor is per plan, in cents/your base currency. Double-check it before approving; it is the one number the scheduler will never cross.
Approve captures the base from the live sale price, not from an older figure recorded during detection. If you've changed the price since the plan was suggested, the plan discounts off the current price.
One live plan per product. You can't stack two clearance plans on the same item; cancel the first to start a different one.
Detection suggests; it never acts. A flagged candidate sitting in the list has changed nothing. Only your approval moves a price.

Questions? Contact [email protected] or visit the FAQ at /faq.

Documentation