Clearance ladder planner
Stuck with stock after Black Friday? See whether marking it down actually beats holding your price, and get a week-by-week discount schedule that only cuts deeper when you’re falling behind.
Your numbers
Units you sell a week at full price.
Cost to hold one unit for a week.
Discount steps
Each step only kicks in if you're behind pace to clear in time.
Sets how much a markdown lifts weekly sales. At 20% off we assume weekly sales rise about 40%.
Enter your units, price, cost, sell-through and clear-out date to see the plan.
Estimates only, based on the numbers you enter. Sell-through at each discount is modelled from the price-sensitivity assumption you set, using a standard price-elasticity curve; it is not a forecast or based on Wayflyer data. Real demand depends on your product, audience and timing.
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Review
How did the weekend actually go?
Price
Will those markdowns still hold margin?
Fund
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Apply for fundingClearance ladder FAQ
A clearance ladder is a markdown schedule that steps the discount up in stages rather than cutting to one price on day one. This tool builds you a three-step ladder (a starting discount, a mid-point step-up and a final push) that only steps up if you're falling behind the pace needed to clear your stock by your target date.
Sell-through rate is how much of your stock you sell over a given period, usually shown as units sold per week or as a percentage of what you started with. This tool uses your current weekly sell-through at full price as the baseline it measures every markdown against, so it can tell whether a discount is actually needed to hit your clear-out date.
Price elasticity of demand measures how much a change in price changes how much people buy: highly elastic demand means a small discount drives a big jump in sales, while inelastic demand means price barely moves the needle. This tool turns that into a plain How price-sensitive are your customers? choice (cautious, average or deal-driven) and uses it to model how each markdown tier lifts your weekly sell-through, with a Fine-tune option to set the underlying elasticity value directly.
Each step in the ladder only kicks in once you fall behind the pace needed to clear your units by the target date at the current discount. If your starting discount is already clearing stock in time, the tool never steps up to the deeper tiers, so you're not discounting further than you need to.
Not always. The Is it worth it? comparison weighs the markdown schedule against simply holding your price and riding out slower sales, accounting for the gross profit on what actually sells, the cost of the discount itself, and any storage cost on units left over. If holding wins, the tool will show that too.
Yes, if you enter one. The optional storage / unit / week field adds a holding cost for every week stock sits unsold, which is factored into the ride-it-out comparison, since stock quietly costs money the longer it sits.
Check your margin on the original discount with the discount break-even calculator, or see how you'd grade a whole Black Friday weekend with the Black Friday report card. Browse every tool in the full Black Friday toolkit.