How to find and fix dead stock in your Shopify store

Dead stock is the most expensive inventory you own, because it costs you twice: the cash you spent to buy it, and the cash you can’t spend because it’s locked up on a shelf. The products rarely announce themselves — they just quietly stop selling. To find them, cross-reference on-hand quantity against units sold over a recent window (90 days is a common default) and rank by the cash sitting still. Then convert it back to cash — markdown, bundle, move, or liquidate — and stop the next batch by buying to demand. Here’s each step in detail.

What counts as dead stock?

Dead stock (or dead inventory) is stock with no — or near-zero — sales over a window you choose. It still appears as an asset in your numbers, but functionally it’s frozen cash plus the storage and handling it quietly consumes. There’s no single universal cutoff; the right window depends on what you sell:

Product type	Typical “dead” window
Fashion / seasonal	30–90 days after the season
Fast-moving consumer goods	90–180 days
Electronics / tech	6–12 months
Not sure? Start here	90 days of near-zero sales

The danger is that it’s invisible in the day-to-day. Your best-sellers demand attention; a dead SKU just sits there, not costing you a sale, not triggering any alert — until a stock count reveals how much money is parked in things nobody’s buying.

How do you find dead stock in Shopify?

The signal is simple: stock on hand, but no recent sales. The work is in cross-referencing the two, and one metric does most of it — sell-through rate:

Sell-through rate = units sold ÷ (units sold + units still in inventory) over a period.

A product with a low and falling sell-through is heading toward dead; a flat zero with stock on the shelf is already there. Three ways to surface it:

• Native reports. Shopify’s Products by sell-through rate and ABC product analysis reports help you see what moves and what doesn’t. ABC grades products by revenue — A is roughly the top 80%, B the next 15%, and C the bottom ~5%, which is where dead stock hides. The catch: the ABC report isn’t on the Basic or Lite plan (you’d add a reporting app there), and these are report-by-report, not a running “what’s gone stale” list.
• Export + spreadsheet. Pull inventory on-hand and units sold for a 60–90 day window, then rank by lowest sales against highest on-hand value. The products at the top — stock sitting still, money tied up — are your dead stock. The catch is this is a point-in-time snapshot that’s stale the moment demand shifts.
• An app. Keeps the list running and ranks SKUs by how long they’ve been stagnant and the cash tied up, so you see it drift rather than discovering it at the next count.

Either way you’re looking for the same thing: units on the shelf and a sales line that’s flat.

How do you clear it without killing margin?

Once you know what’s stuck, convert it back to cash — roughly in this order, cheapest-to-margin first:

1. Discount or run a timed markdown. Often the fastest route. A scheduled sale that cleanly reverts to the original price when it ends keeps your pricing honest and avoids leaving a product stranded at the sale price. (Reprisely does exactly this — a sale that reverts to the exact original price, to the cent.)
2. Bundle it. Pair a slow mover with a best-seller so it rides along on demand that already exists.
3. Move it. Shift units to a location, channel, or market that sells them.
4. Liquidate. Last resort — recover some cash and, importantly, the shelf space.

The point isn’t to maximise the price on dead stock; it’s to stop it costing you and free the cash for products that turn.

How do you stop it coming back?

Dead stock is almost always a buying problem: over-ordering slow movers, or ordering on gut feel instead of demand. Two habits fix most of it:

• Buy to demand. Set reorder points from each product’s real sales velocity, so you reorder the winners on time and stop pouring money into the ones that don’t move.
• Review the tail on a cadence. Look at your slowest SKUs regularly, so a product gets flagged while it’s merely slow — when a small markdown clears it — rather than after it’s fully dead.

The fix: Reorderly

Reorderly is built around both sides of the problem. It surfaces the cash stuck in dead and slow-moving stock against a window you choose — and offers one-click markdowns to recover it — so you act while it’s still slow, not after it’s dead. And it sets reorder points from live sales velocity so you reorder winners without over-buying the rest. It won’t decide your clearance strategy for you, and you pick the “dead” threshold that fits your catalogue. It’s free for small catalogs; the Growth plan is $49/mo (USD) once you scale.