One of the most underrated skills in ecommerce is ordering the right amount of product. That one skill can make or break a business, and after all these years there’s still no magic formula for it. There’s history you can look at and a forecast you can make, but nobody tells you exactly how much stock you’ll be stuck with, or how quickly you’ll sell out. In the end, the whole success of the business rests on the stock you’ve got to sell.
The useful part is that there are really only three levers. How much you commit up front, how fast you find out whether it’s working, and what you do with the answer once you have it. Get those three right and you’re not guessing any less, you’re just guessing with a lot less of the company’s money on the table. Because what costs you isn’t only the write-down at the end. It’s the cash tied up in stock going nowhere, instead of stock that could be moving, and in ecommerce, that’s usually your problem to fix.
The Brand That Sells Out On Purpose
Bronte Campbell built Earthletica while she was still swimming for Australia, four Olympics and three gold medals, which isn’t the standard route into activewear. What got our attention is that half her range showing as sold out isn’t a supply problem. It was the plan.
That was designed from the start. We started out testing product by selling in drops, doing limited drops, scarcity by design, and seeing how long it would take for those to sell out. The idea behind that is keeping our inventory really small.
- Bronte Campbell, Co-founder and CEO, Earthletica
For Bronte it’s a testing method with a marketing side effect. She sells a limited drop, builds a wait list, watches how fast it clears, then uses that data to develop the range properly, without over-ordering and without burning cash a startup doesn’t have. It ties back to sustainability too, since roughly 30% of all clothes are thrown into landfill without ever being sold. The proof it’s working is a 50% repeat rate from her early customers over six months. She ran the same play on media spend, testing Meta ads at $10 a day before raising, hitting a 3.1 ROAS, and buying that information before committing real budget.
Lesson One: Make the First Buy Small Enough That Being Wrong Is Survivable
Start by thinking of the first order on a new line not as a commitment to the product, but as the price of finding out whether it works. That flips the question. You stop asking how many will we sell, and start asking how much you’re willing to pay for the answer.
Run the numbers. A new line lands at $60 a unit. A 3,000-unit first buy puts $180,000 of company cash into a product nobody has bought yet. The same line at 500 units is $30,000. If the 500 miss, you clear them at cost and you’re out twelve grand. If the 3,000 miss, you carry that stock through two seasons, discount it out, and explain the margin every month until it’s gone. And the minimum order quantity is more negotiable than it looks, especially with a supplier you’ve bought from for years. Rebecca Williams, CEO at Seed & Sprout, walked into a turnaround that couldn’t afford to test the expensive way.
I knew full well we did not have the luxury of buying 10,000 units and doing the test and learn. We had the benefit of some really long standing supplier relationships. My counsel to the team was go and ask the question. We would like to put these products up largely on pre-order to get a bend of what the SKU mix was going to look like, and then commit to the larger volumes.
When something misses, and something will, the small run turns it into a learning opportunity instead of a business problem. Seed & Sprout convinced themselves they needed a wine cooler, mostly because it looked good on a shoot. Customers weren’t interested. Small run, giftable, move on.
Lesson Two: Read the Speed of the Drop, Not Just the Sell-Out
The next thing is what you measure once it’s live. A limited run with a wait list hands you a number you can act on: sell-through rate, units sold divided by units received. It’s the most useful number in merchandising and the one most likely to live in someone’s head rather than a report.
But read the speed, not just the total. Two drops, 400 units each, both sold out. One cleared in nine days, the other took eleven weeks. Same revenue, very different instruction. Nine days says buy deeper and buy it now. Eleven weeks says the product works but demand is thin, so hold your depth and fix the marketing first. And a fast sell-out isn’t always a win, it can mean you didn’t buy enough and left money on the table. Sometimes, though, selling out inside a window is the strategy itself. Jason Daniel, founder and CEO of LSKD, has built a lot of the brand on exactly that.
We do a lot of hype drops with limited runs that might only be a hundred units and sell out. If your supplier can look after you, you can do little hype jobs. Which means not everyone can get it, and create that really cool hype piece that creates that word of mouth marketing.
- Jason Daniel, Founder and CEO, LSKD
So measuring sell-through speed does two jobs. It tells you whether a product is working, and it can be the whole demand tactic in itself. Just know that if you don’t sell through, that tactic can blow up publicly, a wait list you built and a product still sitting there in week eleven is a very public way to find out.
Lesson Three: Go In Wanting the Data to Surprise You
The last one can undo all the smarts above. All of this only pays if you let the answer change the decision, and the mindset that makes that possible is wanting to be surprised. Go into the read hoping the numbers prove you right and you’ll end up defending a product that didn’t perform. Go in wanting the data to tell you something you didn’t already know, and the same numbers start doing work for you.
So when they land, rank the range by contribution per unit rather than revenue, and sort it into heroes, core and tail. The heroes get the depth and the marketing. The core keeps the range coherent. The tail gets one honest question: does it earn its place by selling, by bringing in a customer, or by making the rest of the range make sense? None of those three, and it’s costing you cash to keep. Adam Bouris co-founded Who Is Elijah, and they had a product the whole business treated as the hero, right up until they looked properly.bout as plainly as it gets.
We found a segment of customer buying full size products without the Discovery Set, and these guys had the best lifetime value. The person that bought the Discovery Set was the least likely to come back. We used to think this was our hero product. We put it back to full price, and now gross profit went right off and everything was fixed.
- Adam Bouris, Co-founder, Who Is Elijah
Four years of data was telling them, and it still took a deliberate look to see it. Your version of the Discovery Set is probably already sitting in your reporting.
The Takeaway
There’s no magic formula for getting that initial order quantity right. It’s a mix of data and intuition you have to balance. What matters is putting the safeguards and the measurement in place, so that once you have the data, you’re making an informed decision. Keep the first buy small enough that a miss is survivable, read how fast a drop clears rather than just that it did, and go in genuinely hoping to be surprised. That’s how you stop guessing with the company’s money and start proving demand before you commit to the stock.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you decide how much stock to order for a new product? Treat the first order as the price of finding out whether the product works, not a commitment to it. Keep the initial buy small enough that being wrong is survivable, prove demand through a limited run or pre-order, then commit to larger volumes once you have a real read on sell-through. There’s no formula; it’s a balance of data and intuition with safeguards in place.
Can you negotiate minimum order quantities with suppliers? Often yes, especially with long-standing supplier relationships. Seed & Sprout’s approach was to be transparent, articulate the mutual benefit of growing together, and ask to run certain products largely on pre-order to read the SKU mix before committing to larger volumes. It’s a conversation worth having rather than accepting the stated MOQ.
What is sell-through rate and why does it matter? Sell-through rate is units sold divided by units received, and it’s the most useful number in merchandising. But the speed matters as much as the total: two drops that both sell out tell you completely different things if one cleared in nine days and the other took eleven weeks. Fast clearance says buy deeper now; slow clearance says the product works but demand is thin.
Should products sell out fast? It depends on your goal. A deliberate limited-run drop that sells out fast creates scarcity and word-of-mouth, making the sell-out both the marketing and the measurement. But an unintended fast sell-out can mean you under-bought and left demand uncaptured. And if a hyped drop doesn’t sell through, an unsold product against a public wait list is a costly, visible miss.
Based on Episode 659 of the Add To Cart podcast with Bronte Campbell, Co-founder and CEO of Earthletica Join the Add To Cart community for free.
In this Playbook we cover three things ecommerce operators can take into their business:
- Make the first buy small enough that being wrong is survivable
- Read the speed of the drop, not just whether it sold out
- Go into the read wanting the data to surprise you
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