How to find items running out, oversold, or not selling

Three different failures, three views. At risk now is about to go, Oversold has already gone, and Dead stock is money sitting still. See How to choose a stock view and ranking window for switching between them.

What do the status pills mean?

• Healthy: nothing to do.
• Low: shippable available has fallen to five or fewer.
• Critical: worse than low, and the ones to look at first.
• Oversold: below zero. Sold and not in hand.
• Not tracked: Shopify is not counting stock for this item, so no judgement is possible.

Low, critical and oversold together are what At risk now collects, sorted so the worst sit at the top of every ranked view.

How do you find what is about to run out?

At risk now, which puts everything low, critical or oversold in one list.

Read days of cover rather than the stock number. A product with eleven days of cover and a three-week lead time is already a problem, and one with forty units and four months of cover is not.

For turning that into an order, see How to find out what you need to reorder.

What does oversold actually mean?

That the item is below zero available: you have taken money for units you do not have in hand.

Every one of those is a customer waiting for something that is not on a shelf, which is why it has an alerts group of its own.

The Oversold view adds two things the others do not. It shows how long each item has been below zero, and which purchase order, if any, is bringing stock.

Those two together are the whole triage. An item three days negative with stock arriving Friday needs nothing but a note to the customer. An item three weeks negative with nothing inbound is the one to deal with this morning.

Why is oversold read differently from the other views?

Because "how long has this been negative" cannot be answered by looking at stock right now. It needs a record of what the stock was on each of the preceding days.

That is why Oversold reads Tideswell's own stored copy of your stock rather than a live Shopify lookup, and it is worth knowing when a figure there differs slightly from a figure elsewhere on the page.

What do you do about an oversold item?

Three possibilities, in order of likelihood.

If stock is genuinely coming, chase the order. How to find late orders and plan revisions covers finding what is late.

If the count is simply wrong, which is common after a stocktake or a breakage, correct it. See How to work out a restock cost and correct a stock count.

If the item is meant to sell past zero, it is a keep-selling item and does not belong in triage at all. Those are hidden by default for that reason.

How do you find stock that is not selling?

Dead stock, which lists items still holding stock that have not sold within the idle window, ranked by the cash tied up in them.

Set the idle window to 90 days as a starting point. It shows on-hand quantity, the cash in each item, and a total.

That total is the number worth taking to a meeting. It is the cost of decisions already made, and it argues for a markdown, a bundle, or a wholesale offer far better than a list of SKUs does.

Check it before a buying season rather than after, because the cash it names is the cash you were about to commit again.

Should any of these be an alert rather than a screen?

Yes, and they can be. Low stock alerts is a built-in automation that watches this without anybody opening the page, and it can email whoever needs to know.

Turning it on and choosing recipients is How to set up the stock and order alerts.