Tool demo · Inventory

Find the inventory that's quietly killing your margin.

Every SKU you carry is a bet. Some pay off in a week; others sit in a warehouse for a year, quietly eating the margin that funded them. In a catalog of a few hundred variants, the losers hide inside the average — revenue looks fine while cash slowly disappears into stock that will never sell at full price.

The problem with "it's selling fine"

Sell-through is an average, and averages lie. A store can post a healthy blended sell-through while a third of its variants haven't moved a single unit in six weeks. Those variants don't announce themselves. They're scattered across sizes, colorways, and collections — each one individually small, collectively a five-figure hole in working capital. By the time a slow mover is obvious enough to notice by eye, it's usually too old to clear at anything but a punishing discount.

The operators who win at this don't watch inventory by intuition. They score it. Every variant gets a status, every status maps to an action, and the whole catalog gets re-graded on a schedule instead of during a quarterly panic.

What dead stock actually costs

The sticker cost of unsold inventory is the least of it. Stock that doesn't move still charges rent: warehouse space, insurance, counting labor, and the cost of the capital locked inside it. Every month a unit sits, the markdown required to move it deepens — a variant you could have cleared at 20% off in month two often needs 50% off by month six. And the real damage is the reorder you couldn't fund: money trapped in a dead colorway is money you can't spend restocking the style that's actually selling. Dead stock doesn't just lose its own value. It starves your winners.

How the system scores every variant

Age is the spine. As a variant sits, it steps down a status ladder, and each rung carries a deeper suggested discount: Fresh(under 30 days) → Healthy (30–45) → Watch (46–60, −10%) →Markdown (61–90, −20%) →Fire Sale (91+, −30%). Two overlays keep it honest: anything selling fast enough isProtected — shielded from markdown no matter its age — while anything with no sales in 90 days rots straight into Rotting andDead Stock.

Two more states make it usable day to day. A variant you just marked down enters a soak so the system doesn't badger you to cut it again next week. And a variant that'sSold Out but still selling surfaces as a restock candidate instead of disappearing. Below cost is flagged, never hidden — you always see when a suggested cut would eat your margin.

Segment first, then act in bulk

Health is one axis; how you merchandise is another. The dashboard opens on your buckets — Footwear, Clothing, Accessories — each a card showing its units, cost basis, turn, margin, and how many variants need a markdown, alongside analytics for the whole store: the sales trend, the inventory-age spread, and the health-status mix. Click a bucket to drill in: sub-buckets by brand, the full variant table, and the bulk-markdown workflow. That structure is what makes bulk action safe — filter a bucket to its aging variants, select the ones you mean, preview the new prices and any that would fall below cost, and mark them all down in one move. Explore the live dashboard below.

What it actually did

Five figures of capital found sitting in stock we'd stopped selling.

$10k+in one sourcing bucket alone

Marking down by hand meant pulling an aging report, cross-referencing sales against stock and days on hand, and working through thousands of styles — hours of brain-numbing work with plenty of room for error. The dashboard surfaced over $10,000 of cost value in a bucket we hadn't bought from in months. Cutting those 30–40% got them moving again. It's money you never notice while sales look healthy.

Manual review always covers the big items and never the long tail.

When a job takes hours, you triage — so the high-stock styles got marked down and hundreds of styles sitting on one or two pairs in an odd size stayed at full price for months. Individually each one is too small to bother with; together they were five figures. That pattern isn't specific to inventory. Anywhere the work is done by hand, the tail goes unattended, and the tail is usually where the money is.

First-party result — measured at West Coast Deals, a Sato Solutions client running thousands of variants across eight sales channels. Measured in production.

About the data below: this demo is branded West Coast Deals because that's the operation it was built for, but every figure in it is invented — a fixed sample catalogue, not live or historical trading data. The logic is the real thing; the numbers are not.

Live demo

Inventory Health

West Coast DealsSample data193 invented variants across three buckets — open one to segment and mark down.

Analytics

Sales trend · 30 days

Units & revenue over the trailing month.

Inventory age

0–30d37

31–60d70

61–90d28

90+58

Health status

Protected26
Fresh22
Healthy23
Watch30
Markdown20
Fire Sale21
Rotting5
Dead Stock20
Sold Out26

Turn by bucket

Footwear66d
Clothing105d
Accessories83d

From signal to action

A status is only useful if it tells you what to do next:

Protected, Fresh & Healthy— leave them alone. The system won't let you accidentally discount a variant that's still selling well.
Watch — starting to age. A shallow 10% nudge now is cheaper than a deep cut in a month.
Markdown & Fire Sale — select the batch and cut them together. Waiting only makes the required discount deeper.
Rotting & Dead Stock — no sales in 90 days. Mark down aggressively, bundle, or liquidate. The goal is recovered cash, not recovered pride.

The point of scoring the whole catalog is that these decisions stop being one-at-a-time. Filter Fire Sale across a bucket, select every variant, and one markdown clears them — with a preview of exactly how much value you're giving up and which items would dip below cost before you commit.

Why this beats a spreadsheet

Most stores already have this data — it's just trapped in a CSV export that gets pivoted once a quarter and forgotten. A scored system re-grades the entire catalog every time inventory syncs, applies the same thresholds to every variant so nothing slips through on a good gut feeling, and turns a wall of numbers into a short, ranked list of decisions. It's the difference between discovering dead stock at inventory count and catching it while a markdown can still work.

See it run on your catalog

This demo is one build for one business. Yours would be shaped to how you buy, bucket, and discount — your accounts, your thresholds, your workflow. Tell me how you manage stock today and I'll show you what the tool would look like.