You Should Be Talking About Stock Turn as Much as ROAS
Stick this in your weekly trade meeting
Let’s start with a blunt question.
You’re running a multi-million-pound retail business. You’ve got your ROAS, CAC, AOV and LTV memorised. You know how much you’re spending on Meta down to the penny. But ask yourself this: how many times did your inventory turn over in the last 12 months?
If you don’t know, or if it takes a Slack message and three hours to find out, you’re not alone. Stock turn is one of the most critical, under-discussed metrics in commerce. And that needs to change.
The metric no one talks about
Stock turn, how often you sell through and replenish your inventory over a set period, is the heartbeat of your retail operation.
It tells you:
How efficiently you’re using cash
How aligned your buying is with demand
How much margin you’re quietly eroding by holding onto ageing stock
Unlike marketing metrics, it doesn’t shout. It doesn’t show up in your Klaviyo dashboard or get highlighted in your weekly trade deck. But if you ignore it, it will quietly bleed your business.
Poor stock turn ties up capital, slows cashflow, increases warehousing costs, and leads to markdowns. And when you do finally sell it? Your margin’s gone. Worse still, your customers probably had a crap experience along the way.
What happens when stock turn is ignored
When stock turn isn’t tracked or prioritised, a few things happen. None of them are good.
You overbuy. Product sits in the warehouse for months. You forget it’s there. It stops being desirable. You mark it down or write it off.
You misfire on marketing. Your team promotes what they think will convert. But what you need to shift is different. Stock-led marketing requires visibility and alignment. Most brands don’t have either.
You bloat your ops. More manual processes. More inventory reconciliations. More customer service queries when you sell what you don’t actually have. All of it adds up to more headcount than you need.
You lose CX moments. A customer falls in love with a product, adds to cart, checks out... and gets a refund email three days later. Bad data, bad process, bad loyalty.
Stock turn as a competitive advantage
The best retail operators see stock turn as a flywheel. Improve it, and everything else gets easier.
Marketing knows what to push, because product and ops told them what needs to go.
Paid spend becomes more efficient, because you’re not fuelling demand for dead stock.
Customer service gets quieter, because you’re not fixing preventable mistakes.
Cash becomes available, because you’re not sitting on six figures’ worth of "maybe next season."
The real magic happens when stock data is live, reliable, and visible across teams. Suddenly, you’re not guessing, you’re steering.
Improving it without rebuilding your business
You don’t need a full systems overhaul to improve stock turn. You just need focus, and alignment.
Here’s where we’d start:
Cross-functional trading meetings that include ops, not just sales and marketing.
Clear ownership of inventory performance, not just top-line revenue.
Tooling that surfaces live stock data, not just dashboards for the sake of it.
Localised warehousing or fulfilment strategies that match where demand actually is.
Tighter buying cycles that react to sales velocity, not last year’s assumptions.
Most of all, you need to talk about it. Put stock turn on the same slide as ROAS. Ask for it in trade meetings. Make it a shared language across teams.
Final thought: it’s time stock turn sat next to ROAS on your dashboard
You don’t need to choose between being data-driven and product-led. You need to be both. Stock turn sits at the intersection, where product, ops, and marketing meet.
Ignore it, and your margin, cashflow, and customer experience suffer. Prioritise it, and you unlock a more efficient, more resilient, more profitable business.
If you’re serious about growth, stock turn isn’t a back-office metric. It’s a front-line KPI.