Unsold Products: Find Your Dead Stock

Some products sell themselves. Others just sit on the shelf, taking up space and tying up money you could have put to better use. The “Unsold Products” page finds them for you: the products that are listed in your online store but haven’t had a single paid order during the time period you select. The industry often refers to them as dead stock, and they rarely come free of charge.

Where to Find the Page

The page is located in the left-hand menu under Statistics → Products Without Sales. It opens with a 12-month period, and you can change the period using the buttons below the key figures. There’s nothing to set up: the figures are calculated based on your orders and inventory every time you open the page.

What the page measures

A product appears on the list if two conditions are met: it’s listed online in your store, and it hasn’t had a single sale during the selected period. It’s important to understand the rules so you don’t draw the wrong conclusions:

• Only products that are online. Items in the shopping cart and items you’ve already taken offline do not appear on the list.
• Only paid orders count as sales. If an order isn’t marked as paid, it doesn’t count. This is the most common reason a product appears inactive even though it isn’t.
• Canceled orders do not count. Orders with the status New, Pending, In Progress, Ready, Ready for Pickup, Picked Up, Shipped, or Credit Memo count. Canceled orders do not.
• Return orders do not count as a new sale. A return or credit order created from an existing order does not mark the product as sold.
• Variants are counted collectively. If you sell one size of a T-shirt, the entire product is counted as sold.

The four key metrics at the top

• "Products Without Sales " shows the number on the list and the percentage of your online products. If it says 21 out of 47 (44.7%), nearly half of your product range is inactive.
• Tied-up inventory value is the capital tied up in unsold goods—that is, inventory multiplied by cost price.
• "In-stock" shows how many of the unsold products actually have items in stock. An unsold product with no stock doesn’t cost money—only attention.
• “Period” reminds you which time frame you’re looking at.

The “Number” metric tells you how cluttered your product range is. The “Tied-Up Inventory Value” tells you what it’s costing you. Act on the value first.

Period: from 1 to 24 months

Use the buttons above the filters to select 1, 3, 6, 12, 18, or 24 months. The period is calculated retroactively from today, not from the start of the year.

• 1 to 3 months is suitable for fast-moving inventory. Here, three months without sales is already a warning sign.
• 6 months is a good timeframe for most product lines.
• 12 months is the standard and a fair assessment for seasonal items. A Christmas product that hasn’t sold in a full year has had its chance.
• Use18 to 24 months for the tough clean-up.

A good trick is to start at 24 months, remove the worst items, and then work your way down to 12 and 6 months over the next few quarters.

Filter the list

Below the time period buttons, you can narrow down the list. It updates automatically:

• “Supplier” shows only items from a single supplier. This is invaluable before a negotiation meeting, where you can start by pointing out that there are 40 items totaling 180,000 kroner from that very supplier that haven’t sold in a year.
• "Brand" shows only one brand, so you can see if an entire brand has run its course or if it’s just a few specific SKUs.
• "Hide products with 0 in stock " removes the items you don’t have in stock, so you only see the capital that’s actually tied up.

The columns in the table

The table displays 50 products at a time. You can sort by Name, Brand, Supplier, SKU, Stock, Price, Inventory Value, and Last Sold by clicking on the header. An arrow indicates the direction, and another click reverses the sort order.

• ID is the product’s internal number in Shoporama. This is what you use if you need to look up the item in an import or export file.
• Name links to the product’s edit page. Below the name, “Created” shows the relative time, for example, “4 months ago.” Hover your mouse over it to see the exact date.
• Image displays the main image. If the field is empty, the product has no image at all—and that might explain why it isn’t selling.
• Brand, Supplier, and SKU show the product’s affiliations and your own product number.
• Stock is the total inventory for the product, including all variants.
• Price is the item’s regular price, and any sale price is shown in red just below it. If an item has already been marked down and still isn’t selling, the price is rarely the problem.
• Inventory Value is Inventory multiplied by the product’s cost price—that is, the capital tied up in that specific item.
• "Last Sold " shows, as a relative time, when the item was last sold, regardless of how long ago that was. Hover your mouse over it to see the exact date. If the item has never had a paid order, it will say "Never Sold " in red.

The difference between “Sold 14 months ago” and “Never Sold” is greater than it appears. The first item has proven that it can be sold. The second has never found a buyer.

Inventory value is listed as 0 if the product has no cost price. Cost prices are always listed excluding VAT, and you can fill in the missing amounts in bulk. Read more in “Cost Prices and Inventory Value,” or look up the terms under “cost price” and “inventory value.”

Select, export, and take action

Each row has a checkbox, and the checkbox in the table header selects all rows on the page. The shortcut Cmd + A on Mac or Ctrl + A on Windows does the same thing. With products selected, you’ll see two buttons below the list:

• “Show in Product Overview” opens the product overview with exactly the selected items. From there, you can select them again and use the bulk tools, such as “Price Changes,” where you can set a sale price for all of them at once.
• "Set Offline " removes the selected products from the online store after confirmation. They are not deleted, only hidden from customers, and they also disappear from the list, which only shows online products.

In the top right corner, the CSV button downloads the entire list as a spreadsheet, not just the 50 you see. The file reflects your filters and sorting and includes product ID, name, SKU, brand, supplier, price, stock, cost price, tied inventory value, date of last sale, number of days since last sale, and creation date.

How to Use the List in Practice

1. Sort by Inventory Value, descending. Start with the most valuable items. The ten most expensive items free up the most capital the fastest.
2. Hide products with 0 in stock. Items with no stock don’t tie up your capital and can wait.
3. Check the “Created” column. If an item is two months old, it hasn’t had a fair chance. Leave it alone and check again in a quarter.
4. Find the cause before you lower the price. A price reduction on an item no one can find is a waste of money.
5. Decide and act. Whether it’s marketing, a promotional price, a campaign, or phasing it out with “Set Offline”—make the decision now, not in three months.
6. Repeat this every quarter. This routine keeps your product lineup sharp—much better than a major cleanup every other year.

The math is often surprising. If you have 300,000 kroner tied up in items that haven’t sold in a year, and you free up half of that through a sale, you’ll have 150,000 kroner for items you know will sell. That’s cheaper than borrowing the money, and it frees up space in your warehouse.

If the list is empty, you’ll see the message “Well done! All your online products have sold within the last 12 months,” where the number corresponds to the time period you’ve selected. This happens less often than you might think.

How this page ties in with the other analyses

• ABC analysis ranks the products that actually sell and identifies your C-items. This page identifies the ones that don’t sell at all.
• Cost of Goods Sold & Profit Margin shows your profit margin month by month, so you can track what a sale costs you in terms of profit.
• Product Sales is the mirror image: sales per item over a period along with current inventory, so you know what to restock.
• Inventory Statistics provides a comprehensive inventory overview, including tied-up capital across your entire inventory.

For those with a technical background

The CSV file is named produkter-uden-salg.csv; it is semicolon-separated in UTF-8 with a byte order mark, so Danish characters open correctly in Excel, and it has English column headers. It contains up to 10,000 products. The period is a rolling window starting from the moment you open the page, not full calendar months.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between this page and the ABC analysis?

The ABC analysis ranks the products that sell based on how much they contribute to revenue. This page shows the items that haven’t sold at all and therefore never appear in a sales report.

Why is an item on the list even though I sold it recently?

This page only counts paid orders. If an order isn’t marked as paid—for example, an invoice order awaiting payment—the sale isn’t counted. The same applies to canceled orders and return orders created from an existing order.

Why does Inventory Value show 0 kroner when I have items in stock?

Because the product doesn’t have a cost price. The inventory value is the quantity in stock multiplied by the cost price, and without a cost price, the result is zero. If you enter the missing cost prices, both the inventory value here and your profit margin calculation will be accurate.

Is the inventory value inclusive or exclusive of VAT, and can I use this figure in my accounting?

Excluding VAT, since cost prices are always entered excluding VAT in Shoporama. The figure is a good starting point for a discussion with your accountant about writing down obsolete inventory, but it is not in itself an accounting entry.

What exactly happens when I click “Set Offline”?

The selected products are removed from the online store so that customers can no longer view or purchase them. You’ll be asked to confirm first. The products aren’t deleted, and inventory, prices, descriptions, and images remain unchanged. You can put them back online from the product overview.

Do variants and multiple warehouse locations count toward the total inventory?

The “Stock” column shows the total inventory for the product across all variants, and the number is not broken down by warehouse location. The same applies on the sales page: if you sell just one variant, the entire product is considered sold and is removed from the list.

Can I export the entire list to Excel?

Yes, click the CSV button in the top right corner. The file contains the entire list—not just the page you’re viewing—and it reflects your filters and sorting settings.

Should I always remove products that aren’t selling?

No. First, check whether the product can even be found. If it’s missing an image, is in a category no one visits, or has never been mentioned in a newsletter, the problem is visibility—not the product itself.

Why are my brand-new products on the list?

Because they haven’t sold anything yet. That’s why the creation date appears below the product name. If the product is only a few weeks or months old, leave it alone and check again during your next review.

How often should I check the page?

Once a quarter is sufficient for most people. If you have seasonal items, the best time is right after the season ends, while you still have time to launch a sale. If you sell fast-moving items, a monthly review with the period set to 3 months may make more sense.

If you have any questions about “Products with No Sales” or the other statistics, feel free to email us at support@shoporama.dk.