Dead stock

Stockouts are visible — someone complains. Dead stock is silent, which is why it accumulates.

What counts as dead

A product is flagged DEAD when its days of cover exceeds the dead stock threshold, 180 days by default. At that point you are holding roughly six months of demand, and the capital in it is doing nothing.

The threshold is configurable, and worth setting deliberately. A store selling perishables might use 60 days; one selling spare parts for machinery might legitimately use 730, because slow-moving inventory is the business.

The dead stock view

WooCommerce → SimplifyStock → Dead stock sorts by capital tied up — units on hand times cost price — rather than by days of cover. A hundred units of something worth £2 matters less than four units of something worth £400, even though the second has better cover.

Columns worth knowing:

• Tied up — units × cost. Requires cost price to be set; without it the view falls back to sorting by units and says so.
• Last sold — date of the most recent order. A product with cover of 400 days that sold yesterday is different from one that has not moved since March.
• Trend — whether cover is getting worse. Rising cover on an already-dead product means it is still being reordered by something. That is usually a fixed safety stock override that nobody revisited.

Acting on it

The view is a list of decisions, not a report to file:

Discount. The fastest way to recover capital. Record the promotion so the resulting demand spike is treated as an intervention rather than as a genuine change in demand — otherwise the model will forecast a level of demand that only existed because of the discount, and you will reorder into it.

Bundle. Pairing dead stock with a fast mover moves units without a headline discount. Bundled sales are attributed to both products.

Delist. Removing it from sale stops it distorting category-level fallbacks used by new products.

Write off. Adjust stock to zero with a reason. The adjustment is excluded from demand history, so a write-off does not read as a sale.

Preventing it

Most dead stock traces back to one of three things, and all three are visible in the product’s own history:

1. A fixed safety stock override set during a shortage and never removed.
2. A minimum order quantity far above the product’s real demand — you are buying two years of cover every time you order.
3. A discontinued product still being reordered because nobody marked it discontinued.

The dead stock view flags which of these applies where it can tell.