The Real Cost of Overstocking: Why £3.5m a Year Goes Unsold

An average of £3.5m in lost revenue a year. That’s the figure ROI Hunter’s research put on overstocking across UK retail - nearly £900,000 lost every quarter, with 62% of retailers currently struggling with excess stock they can’t shift at full price.

The Numbers Behind the Headline

A few figures from that research are worth sitting with:

• 62% of retailers are currently struggling with overstocking
• 56% lack the visibility to know which products are likely to become deadstock before it happens
• 48% of inventory, on average, ends up discounted just to move it
• 47% of marketing budget goes toward pushing items that are already low on availability, rather than the stock that actually needs to shift

Taken together, the pattern is clear: marketing is often optimizing for the wrong problem, and purchasing is making decisions with limited insight into what’s actually going to sell through.

Overstocking Isn’t a Purchasing Problem - It’s a Visibility Problem

It’s tempting to read “overstocking” as a buying mistake - order less, more carefully. But ROI Hunter’s CEO Karel Schindler pointed at something more structural: promotion strategies and purchasing decisions are both operating on the same limited signal - historical sales velocity and demand assumptions made months in advance - with no reliable read on how customers are actually receiving the products already on shelves or in warehouses.

By the time a product’s sell-through rate makes it obviously headed for deadstock, the buying decision that created the surplus was made a season ago and can’t be undone. The visibility gap isn’t in the purchasing system - it’s upstream, in what a retailer knows about a product’s real reception before the sales data has fully caught up.

Discounting Treats the Symptom, Not the Cause

Nearly half of inventory getting discounted just to clear space isn’t a strategy - it’s a release valve. It protects warehouse capacity in the short term while eroding margin and, per the research, risking real stock eventually being written off to landfill. None of that addresses why the forecast was wrong in the first place.

Where the Missing Signal Actually Lives

Sales velocity tells you what sold. It doesn’t tell you whether the customers who bought it were satisfied, whether they’re likely to reorder, or how quickly they’re actually using the product once it arrives - all of which are earlier, more direct signals of real demand than aggregate sell-through. That gap, and why even an accurate forecast can still miss the window to act on it, is what we cover next in why accurate forecasts still miss the reorder window.

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Agaya Cloud’s TrueSignal doesn’t manage inventory or purchasing - it captures the post-purchase signal (satisfaction, reorder intent, consumption pace) that most forecasting processes never see. See how TrueSignal works.