Growth capped by a restock limit nobody was watching

The brand's three best sellers were out of stock roughly four months out of every ten, and every conversation about it ended with the warehouse manager pointing at a full pallet rack. The stock existed; Amazon simply would not accept it.

A low Inventory Performance Index had pushed the account onto a tight restock limit, and the limit was being consumed by slow-moving SKUs that had been shipped in optimistically two years earlier. So the account was storing eighteen months of cover on items that sold four a week, and five weeks of cover on items that sold four hundred. Each stockout then cost rank, which cost sales, which lowered sell-through further — the limit tightened as a direct consequence of the problem it was causing.

We freed the allowance before adding a single unit.

• Dead stock cleared first — the slowest 30% of ASINs liquidated or removed, which is what raises sell-through and with it the restock allowance.
• Allowance allocated by velocity, so the hero ASINs receive cover proportional to what they actually sell rather than a flat split.
• Advertising paced to inventory — spend cut automatically as cover falls below three weeks, so budget is never spent driving traffic to a listing about to go dark.
• Split shipments and multi-node placement to reduce the receiving delays that had been eating a week of cover on every restock.

In-stock rate on the hero ASINs rose from 62% to 96%, and revenue grew 74% with no new products and no increase in manufacturing.

The loop that had been running against the brand now runs for it: consistent availability raises sell-through, higher sell-through raises the allowance, and a larger allowance makes the next stockout less likely. Clearing the dead stock cost real money in one quarter and unlocked more than that in the next.