The spreadsheet
An Excel list is accurate on the day it is made and stale a week later. Nobody owns keeping it current, so it quietly stops being sent.
FOR MANUFACTURERS AND DISTRIBUTORS
Sell surplus inventory without building another sales channel.
Procurement knows which stock has stopped moving. Finance carries it on the balance sheet. The warehouse stores it. What none of them has is a repeatable way to turn it back into cash that does not consume a person's week. Dead Stock provides that process, and leaves the price, the visibility and the release decision with you.
Pilot
Start with one category, or with a controlled data sample. No integration required to begin.
A seller release control panel showing 40 of 148 units released, an enforced minimum price, a discount cadence of minus four percent every thirty days, visibility set to verified buyers, three named buyer exclusions, channel restrictions on, a withdrawal rule and a manual override, with a note that every change is written to the audit log.
WHERE IT COMES FROM
Surplus is not a failure. It is a by-product of operating.
Every item below was bought for a good reason. The reason expired; the stock did not.
WHY THE USUAL ROUTES DISAPPOINT
The methods available today each fail in a predictable way.
None of these is a mistake by the people using them. Each is a rational response to not having a process.
Email outreach
It reaches the contacts you already have. The buyer who needs exactly this item is almost never among them.
The sales team
A salesperson measured on new product revenue will not spend a morning on eleven units of a discontinued fitting, and they are right not to.
Bulk lots
A mixed pallet moves quickly because the buyer prices for the risk of everything they cannot use. You pay for that risk in the discount.
The ERP record itself
It was written to find the item in a rack, not to convince an external buyer to raise a purchase order.
WHAT DEAD STOCK DOES
Eight things, so your team does not have to.
Each item below has a status. Read them: the difference between what runs in a pilot today and what is still being built is the most useful information on this page.
PilotIn development
Pilot
Identifies recoverable candidates
Applies ageing, movement, safety-stock and demand rules you agree to, and explains why each item was flagged.
Pilot
Completes missing product data
Resolves manufacturer, identifiers, category and technical attributes, with a confidence score per field.
Pilot
Produces market-ready offers
Turns an approved product record into an offer a buyer can evaluate without calling you first.
Pilot
Routes approvals
Puts the identity, quantity and visibility decision in front of the person who is allowed to make it.
Pilot
Applies a pricing policy
Moves price on your cadence, inside your floor, with every change logged.
In development
Matches buyer demand
Compares captured buyer requests against your approved offers and alerts the buyer when there is a match.
In development
Creates the warehouse task
Turns a confirmed sale into a reserve, pick and pack instruction rather than an email.
In development
Reports recovery
Shows records processed, time to an approved listing, match rate and recovered value against the agreed baseline.
INSIDE YOUR ORGANISATION
Five roles, and what each one actually has to do.
Recovery projects stall when they are owned by everyone. This is the smallest set of commitments that makes one work.
| Role | Job in the recovery workflow | Realistic time commitment |
|---|---|---|
| Procurement | Qualifies which inventory is genuinely recoverable and supplies product context nobody else has | Highest at the start, then occasional |
| Finance | Sets the price floor and the recovery rules, and defines the baseline that success is measured against | One decision, revisited quarterly |
| Warehouse | Confirms physical availability and fulfils tasks when a sale is confirmed | Per transaction, inside existing process |
| IT / ERP owner | Approves the data access path and the export or feed | One-off at setup |
| Management | Reviews recovered value and operational impact, and decides whether to widen the scope | Periodic review |
A first pilot does not need all five in the room. It needs procurement to pick a category and IT to approve one export.
YOUR CONTROLS
Nine settings that decide what the market ever sees.
This section exists because the first objection is never about technology. It is about losing control of your own pricing and your own customer relationships.
Pilot
Approved quantity
Release eleven of a hundred and forty-eight. The rest stays invisible.
Minimum price
A hard floor the system enforces, not a guideline someone has to remember.
Discount cadence
How often and how far a price may move. Slow and shallow is a valid policy.
Visibility
Private, restricted to approved buyers, or open to verified businesses, per item.
Buyer restrictions
Exclude named buyers or buyer types where a commercial agreement requires it.
Channel restrictions
Keep specific products out of specific channels entirely.
Category exclusions
Whole categories can be permanently out of scope, enforced at import rather than at review.
Audit trail
Every approval and price change recorded with its owner and timestamp.
Manual override
Change or withdraw anything at any point, including while an offer is live.
A seller release control panel showing 40 of 148 units released, an enforced minimum price, a discount cadence of minus four percent every thirty days, visibility set to verified buyers, three named buyer exclusions, channel restrictions on, a withdrawal rule and a manual override, with a note that every change is written to the audit log.
HOW A PILOT RUNS
Start with one category, not a transformation.
A controlled pilot answers one question: does this recover more than it costs, on your data, in your operation. Eight steps, and you can stop after any of them.
PilotIn development
- Week 1
Define the category
Pick one product family where surplus is known to exist and where releasing it carries no production risk.
- Week 1
Export a data sample
A CSV or XLSX of that category, with whatever fields you already hold.
- Week 1–2
Map the fields
Agree what each column means. This is where an ERP partner earns their fee if you have one.
- Week 2
Enrich the sample
Product identity is resolved and scored. You see exactly how complete your data was.
- Week 2–3
Review quality
Your team checks a statistically useful subset. This is the decision point that matters most.
- Week 3
Set the pricing policy
Finance sets the floor and the cadence. Procurement confirms the releasable quantities.
- Week 4–8
Test demand
Approved offers are exposed at the visibility level you chose and matched against captured requests.
- Week 8+
Decide on scale
Measured against the baseline agreed in step six, you either widen the scope or you do not.
An eight-step pilot timeline from defining a category in week one to deciding on scale after week eight, with data export, field mapping, enrichment, quality review, pricing policy and demand testing in between.
WHAT GETS MEASURED
Eleven measures, agreed before the pilot starts.
Measurement is agreed in advance so that the result is a finding rather than an argument. The baseline is yours: what this stock would have recovered through your current route.
In development
- Eligible inventory value in the selected category
- Records processed
- Records classified correctly on review
- Required-field completion rate after enrichment
- Time from raw record to approved listing
- Published-to-match conversion
- Recovery value against the approved baseline
- Time to sale
- Fulfilment accuracy
- Manual hours spent by your team
- Stock and warehouse space released
This is a measurement framework, not a promise. Dead Stock publishes no benchmark figures, because it has none that have been verified. Any platform quoting you a recovery percentage before seeing your data is quoting you someone else's.
THE HARD QUESTIONS
Six reasons companies say no, and the honest answer to each.
Pilot
We cannot expose our prices publicly.
Then do not. Visibility is set per item, and private or restricted-to-approved-buyers is a permanent option, not a trial setting. Many sellers run their entire recovery without a single public price.
Our ERP data is a mess.
That is the normal case and the reason the enrichment step exists at all. If your records were already buyer-ready you would not need this product. What matters is that you review the result before anything is published.
We cannot risk selling safety stock.
Safety stock and production-critical items are excluded by rule at the detection step, before a candidate list is ever produced. The exclusion is enforced at import, not checked afterwards by a person.
Our warehouse cannot absorb random small orders.
A fair concern, and the reason fulfilment is a defined task in your existing process rather than an inbox message. You also control the minimum order quantity, so a single-unit order is only possible if you allow it.
We do not know whether demand exists.
Neither does anyone else until it is tested, which is precisely what the pilot is for. Buyer demand is captured before offers are published, so the first signal comes from real requests rather than a forecast.
We cannot publish certain suppliers or products.
Category, supplier and channel exclusions are configured before the first import and enforced at publication. If a whole product family must never appear, it never enters the workflow.
What it costs.
A success-based commercial model. Terms are defined after a short inventory and integration assessment.
The assessment exists because the right terms depend on category, volume and how much of the workflow you run yourselves. A number quoted before that conversation would be a guess.
Start with one category, not a full transformation.
An inventory review is a structured conversation about one product family: what is in it, what is recoverable, what a pilot would cost you in effort, and how you would know whether it worked.