Free Tool
Dead Stock Calculator
Find out exactly how much your slow-moving and dead inventory is costing you every month — holding costs, capital locked, and daily burn rate.
Researched by the ShelfMerge Research Team
Total units of dead or slow-moving stock
What you paid per unit (cost price)
3PL fee or allocated warehouse cost per unit/month
How long this stock has been sitting
What is dead stock?
Dead stock is inventory that has not sold and is unlikely to sell at current prices without intervention. It sits in your warehouse or 3PL, accumulating storage fees, while the cash used to buy it stays frozen — unavailable for anything else. Most Shopify merchants have more dead stock than they realize because standard analytics show what's selling, not what is quietly draining cash in the background.
The real cost of dead stock is twofold: direct storage cost (the fees you pay to hold it) and opportunity cost (what that capital could be doing instead). A merchant with $30,000 tied in dead stock is not just paying $300–$600/month in 3PL fees — they're also missing the ability to invest in faster-turning products, paid acquisition, or simply keeping more cash on hand for supplier deposits.
How to identify dead stock in your Shopify store
The threshold depends on your category. A seasonal product has 90 days to sell and then it's dead. A year-round SKU should be reviewed at 60 days without a sale. Key signals: units sold in last 30/60/90 days compared to total units on hand, velocity trend (slowing or stopped), and days of supply at current velocity (infinity means no velocity at all).
Shopify's built-in analytics won't flag this automatically. You need to run an export and sort by "units sold — last 90 days" to find products with zero or near-zero movement. Every product on that list deserves a deliberate decision. ShelfMerge automates this scan daily, classifying every SKU and showing the total dead inventory dollar value on your health dashboard.
What causes dead stock to accumulate
- Buying too much of a product based on early sales enthusiasm that didn't hold
- Seasonal products that sold in Q4 but have no demand the rest of the year
- Product variants (colors, sizes) that customers never choose — often visible in Shopify variant reports
- Supplier minimum order quantities forcing excess buys on slow-moving lines
- Product launches that missed the market — never found product-market fit
- Promotional boosts masking low organic demand — promo ends, sales disappear
How ShelfMerge surfaces dead stock automatically
ShelfMerge analyzes your full Shopify order history and classifies every product by sales velocity trend. Dead products show up in your Dead Inventory report with total units, days since last sale, capital tied up, and carrying cost per month. Instead of running a manual export and sorting a spreadsheet, you see the complete picture in one place — updated daily.
Common questions about dead stock in ecommerce
How to use this dead stock tool
Install and connect
OAuth takes 30 seconds. ShelfMerge requests read_products and read_orders scopes — nothing more. No credit card required to get your first health score.
Five engines run in parallel
ShelfMerge syncs your order history and product catalog, then runs five analysis engines. Your first health score appears in under 60 seconds.
Act on what you find
See which products are dead weight, which variants to cut, and which products are stealing each other's sales. Act on insights or let ShelfMerge alert you weekly.
Common questions about dead stock
What does the health score measure?
The health score is a weighted 0–100 number built from five signals: dead inventory percentage, products missing images, dead variants (zero sales), duplicate product count, and cannibalization severity. A score above 80 is healthy. Below 60 means real revenue is leaking somewhere in your catalog.
How does dead inventory detection work?
ShelfMerge analyzes sales velocity, days since last sale, and current inventory levels for every product. Each product is classified as thriving, slowing, dying, or dead. The dead inventory report shows the total dollar value tied up in stock that hasn't moved.
What is product cannibalization?
Cannibalization happens when two products in your catalog compete for the same buyer — one gets a sale and the other loses one. ShelfMerge detects this using Pearson correlation on weekly sales data. A high negative correlation between two products is a strong cannibalization signal.
Will ShelfMerge delete my products?
No. ShelfMerge is advisory only. Every insight is a recommendation, not an automated action. The Cleanup tab lets you merge duplicate products with a full undo option, but nothing is ever auto-deleted or archived without your explicit confirmation.
Let ShelfMerge find your dead stock automatically
ShelfMerge connects directly to your Shopify store and runs this analysis automatically — across your entire catalog, updated daily.
Free plan — no credit card required.