Give every item an exit plan before you buy it

Before you spend $500,000 on inventory, decide exactly how you are going to get rid of it. Large retailers do this before their stock even arrives. It is called a markdown ladder: every item gets its own exit plan, set in advance, so nobody has to guess when something stops selling.

What a markdown ladder looks like

A markdown ladder is a set of steps tied to how long an item has been sitting. Here is an example for one item:

#	Days since it arrived	What you do
1	0 to 30	Protect your margins. Sell at full price.
2	31 to 45	Start cutting the price.
3	46 to 60	Bundle it with faster-moving items.
4	61 and up	Liquidate it to get your money back.

The exact days will differ by product. The point is that the plan exists before the stock does. When an item hits day 31, the price drops. Nobody has to argue about it.

Why this matters for live sellers

Unsold stock is money you cannot spend on anything else. The longer it sits, the harder it is to move, and the more space and attention it takes up.

Without a plan, most sellers fall back on hope: "maybe it'll sell next month." Then next month comes, and the same boxes are still on the shelf. A ladder removes the emotion. It also means your team knows what to do without asking you every time.

Build your ladder with AI

You do not need special software for a first version. ChatGPT can do the maths if you give it your data.

1. Export your sales history, your current inventory and your cost of goods into an Excel file.
2. Upload it to ChatGPT.
3. Ask it to calculate the days to sell for each product, and the days to sell for each price range.
4. Then ask it to create a markdown ladder for each product and each price range, based on those numbers.

Fast sellers get a short ladder. Slow sellers get earlier price cuts and bundling. Items that never move tell you what not to buy again.

Check the output before you act on it. AI can misread columns or mix up dates, so spot-check a few products against what you know from your own shows.

What to do in your own shop

1. Pull your sales and inventory data into one spreadsheet, with what each item cost you.
2. Work out days to sell by product and by price range, by hand or with ChatGPT.
3. Write a ladder for each group: when you protect margin, when you cut, when you bundle, when you liquidate.
4. Share it with your team so everyone knows what happens on day 31, 46 and 61.
5. Set the ladder before your next big buy, not after the stock arrives.