---
title: How to find items running out, oversold, or not selling
url: https://tideswell.xyz/docs/inventory/running-out-oversold-and-dead
description: Three views for three different problems. Stock about to go, stock you have sold and do not have, and stock tying up cash.
---

> Documentation index: fetch https://tideswell.xyz/llms.txt to discover every page before exploring further.

# 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
<Ref to="inventory/choose-a-view-and-window" /> for switching between them.

## What do the status pills mean? [#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? [#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 <Ref to="inventory/find-what-to-reorder" />.

## What does oversold actually mean? [#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? [#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? [#what-do-you-do-about-an-oversold-item]

Three possibilities, in order of likelihood.

If stock is genuinely coming, chase the order. <Ref to="purchasing/find-late-orders" />
covers finding what is late.

If the count is simply wrong, which is common after a stocktake or a breakage, correct it.
See <Ref to="inventory/restock-cost-and-corrections" />.

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? [#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? [#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 <Ref to="automations/stock-and-order-alerts" />.