Days out of Stock (DOOS) is another essential unit of measure for your inventory and product replenishment. It is a crucial inventory metric which helps you calculate a more precise Sales Velocity (SV) for your products. Most merchants do not track this metric, but they should. The rule of thumb on the marketplaces: You cannot sell products on the marketplaces if you are out of stock.
There are variations to DOOS. You could track days in stock instead of days out of stock for example. Either method can be used for determining sales days for a selected period, but we choose to use DOOS because it is a much more intuitive metric. Knowing how many days a product was out of stock during a selected period seems more meaningful than how many days it was in stock. Plus, out of stocks captures your attention and prompts a call to action to replenish it whereas a product that is in stock does not capture your attention in the same way.
DOOS is a metric indicating the number of days a product was out of stock during a specified period. When looking back at a previous sales period, it is important to know how many of those days a product was out of stock.
The DOOS value for a product should be used to reduce the number of days in a sales evaluation period. For example: You are looking at a period of 90 days of sales for a product. Of those 90 days, let’s say it was out of stock for 30 days. The sales evaluation period for this product should be adjusted to 60 instead of 90 days. There were no sales when the product was out of stock so there is no need including those days in the total.
The formula is as follows: evaluation period (90 days) minus DOOS (30 days) equals the adjusted evaluation period for the product of 60 days.
Using DOOS to reduce evaluation days will derive a more precise SV for product replenishment since you are using the actual days the product was available for sale. Calculating precise SV will help reduce out of stocks and ensure you are selling on the marketplaces everyday possible.
Marketplace Reporting tracks DOOS for each product out of stock each day. Communique for Marketplaces replenishment reports have several DOOS options which aid in providing the most precise SV possible.
Rule of thumb on the marketplaces: If you are out of stock, you cannot sell.
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