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This is the release our clients have been asking for since we launched: StoreHero now does ecommerce inventory management the way a profit-focused operator actually thinks about it — not “what’s in the warehouse,” but “what is our stock position costing or making us, right now, in euros.” Five new checks went live this week: Stockout Risk, Overstock Opportunity, Push This Week, Reorder Risk, and a daily rollup that ties them together. This has been the single most-requested feature in our client Slack channels for months, and it’s live today.
Why we built this
Every DTC brand we work with already has an inventory number in Shopify. What none of them had was the connection between that number and the two things that actually move the P&L: ad spend and margin. IHL Group puts the global cost of inventory distortion — stockouts plus overstock combined — at $1.77 trillion a year ($1.29T in lost stockout sales, $818B in tied-up overstock). Mirakl separately pegs ecommerce-specific stockout losses at $1.2 trillion. Those numbers are so big they stop meaning anything, so here’s the version that matters at brand scale: every day a bestseller sits at zero stock while its ad set keeps spending is a day you’re paying to acquire customers you can’t fulfil. Every SKU sitting dead in the warehouse is cash that isn’t funding this month’s media plan.
Before StoreHero vs. after StoreHero
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Finding a stockout risk | Someone notices a “low stock” tag in Shopify, usually after a customer complains | StoreHero flags it with days-of-cover, revenue at risk, and whether ad spend is making it worse |
| Connecting inventory to ad spend | Nobody checks — ops doesn’t see the Meta account, media buying doesn’t see the stock count | StoreHero cross-references Meta/Google spend changes against the SKUs they’re driving demand for |
| Dead stock | Discovered once a year at stocktake, or when cash gets tight | Surfaced continuously, in euros, sorted by what’s actually recoverable |
| What to push this week | Gut feel, or whatever the founder remembers is “doing well” | Ranked by margin, stock headroom, and proven-but-under-advertised demand |
| Reorder timing | A spreadsheet somebody forgot to update | Flagged the moment days-of-cover crosses the reorder line — honest about it when lead time isn’t known yet, rather than guessing |
The benefits — and how it actually saves money
It stops you paying to advertise stock you don’t have. This is the biggest single leak we see. A campaign doesn’t know its product just sold out — it keeps spending, keeps winning the auction, keeps sending people to a product page that can’t convert. StoreHero catches this by name-matching your live ad activity against your real-time stock position, so you can pull the spend back to the SKUs that can actually fulfil it.
It turns dead stock into a decision, not a surprise. Cash sitting in a warehouse for 18 months isn’t “inventory,” it’s a loan you gave yourself at 0% interest and forgot about. Surfacing the euro value continuously — not at year-end stocktake — means you can act on it while there’s still a season left to sell into, or make the liquidation call before the write-off is forced on you.
It tells you what to spend more on, not just what to worry about. Most inventory tools are alarm systems — they only ever tell you something’s wrong. Push This Week is the other half: the SKUs with margin, stock, and proven demand that nobody’s advertising yet, which is free money sitting next to the fire alarms.
What this actually found, live
We ran all five checks against a real connected store this week — a personalised-gifts brand — and the results are exactly why we built this.
One ad set had its daily budget raised 60% (€7,000 → €11,200) eight days before the check ran. Cross-referenced against stock, two of the products that ad set’s audience converts on were sitting at 1-2 days of cover — one had 25 sales in the last 90 days against a single unit left on the shelf. That’s not a hypothetical: that’s live ad spend, right now, being pointed at a product that’s about to stop existing on the shelf. The fix took one recommendation, logged and reconciled automatically: pull the budget back until it restocks.
On the other side, the same store had €1.18 million sitting in dead and overstocked SKUs that a manual stocktake would only have caught at year-end — and a chunk of it wasn’t actually dead, it was Christmas stock sitting inside the reactivation window, which the seasonality check correctly held back from a “discount it now” recommendation that would have been a mistake three months early. Separately, Push This Week surfaced a baby-gift bundle family — strong margin, rising organic demand, literally zero ad spend pointed at it — that had gone completely unnoticed because nobody was cross-checking margin against ad coverage by hand.
None of that required a new dashboard to stare at. It required someone — or something — watching stock, ad spend, and margin at the same time, continuously, instead of quarterly.
Get this on your account. If you’re already connected to StoreHero, these five checks are live now — ask your account contact to run the first one. If you’re not yet connected, book a call and we’ll show you what it finds in your own store, live, in the first session.
Frequently asked questions
What is dead stock?
Dead stock is inventory that hasn’t sold in a meaningful window and shows no sign of moving — distinct from seasonal stock that’s simply between occasions (Christmas stock in September isn’t dead, it’s early).
How do you tell dead stock from stock that’s just off-season?
Check whether the product serves a calendar occasion within the next 90-120 days. If yes, it’s a hold, not a write-off. If the occasion has already passed with no rebound, or there isn’t one, it’s genuinely dead.
Does an out-of-stock product still cost you money if you’re not actively promoting it?
Yes, indirectly — but the acute version is when it’s still being actively advertised. That’s the highest-value catch in this release: a stockout with live, rising ad spend behind it.
Do I need a warehouse management system for this?
No. This runs off your existing Shopify, Meta, and Google connections — no new system, no migration.
