Restocking on units sold is how you end up with dead stock

Most reorder decisions start with one number: units sold. It is the wrong number, and it is wrong in the same direction every time.

Units sold is a gross figure. It counts the coat that went out and stayed out, and it counts the coat that went out, came back three weeks later and is now sitting in the returns bin. Buy against the gross figure and you are ordering for demand that was never really there.

Net the returns off first. A style selling forty a week with a nine per cent return rate is really selling thirty-six. On a twelve-week buy that gap is around fifty units, which on a lot of styles is the whole margin on the order.

Count what is already coming back. Returned units in good condition are stock. They are just stock in the wrong place, arriving on a delay. If eighty units are in the returns pipeline, that is eighty you do not need to make.

Count what is already on the water. Open purchase orders and inbound shipments are stock too. Reordering a style that has a container in transit is the most common way to double-buy, and it happens because the two numbers usually live in different systems.

Read cover, not rate. Weekly velocity on its own says nothing about risk. Weeks of cover, worked out after returns and inbound are accounted for, tells you whether you are about to stock out or about to be buried.

The quantity that matters is what is left after all of that: demand net of returns, minus what you hold, minus what is on the way, minus what is coming back. It is a smaller number than the one on the sell-through report, and it is the honest one.

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What this looks like in practice

Reportly's restock view starts from demand net of returns rather than units sold, then subtracts stock on hand, units on open purchase orders, units in transit and units expected back from returns.

The size split it proposes comes from what actually sold and stayed sold, not from an even spread across the curve, and any size without enough evidence behind it is flagged rather than filled in.

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