Beyond Forecasting: How KasbPro Classifies Every Product in Your WordPress Store
Forecasting answers how much you will sell. Classification answers what to do about each product right now — reorder, healthy, overstock, or dead stock. Here is exactly how each label is decided.
A demand forecast tells you how many units you will probably sell. It does not tell you, at a glance, which of your two hundred products need attention today and which are fine left alone. That second question is what classification answers, and it is worth separating from forecasting because it is a genuinely different calculation, not just a repackaging of the same number.
The six labels
Every product with stock or sales history is placed into exactly one of six classes:
- reorder — out of stock with demand, or days of cover shorter than the lead time. Acting late here directly costs sales.
- low — days of cover shorter than lead time plus review cycle. Not urgent yet; plan for it this cycle.
- healthy — enough cover, not excessive. No action needed.
- overstock — far more days of cover than you will plausibly sell through. Capital sitting on a shelf.
- dead — no sale in 90+ days, with stock still on hand. Money tied up in something that has stopped moving.
- nodata — no sales history yet, so nothing can be classified with confidence. New products land here honestly, rather than being forced into a guess.
Why this is a different question than forecasting
Forecasting is about rate — how fast is this selling. Classification is about state — given the rate and the stock on hand, what does this product need right now. A product can have healthy demand and still be classified "reorder" simply because the stock on hand will not survive the delivery lead time. Another product can have zero recent demand and still not be "dead" yet — it needs 90 days of silence before that label applies, so a slow month does not falsely flag something that will pick back up.
What "dead stock" actually costs you
Dead stock is not just "stuff we're not selling" — it is capital. KasbPro values dead and overstocked inventory at cost price and totals it, so instead of a vague sense that "we have too much of some things," you get an actual number: this many dollars are sitting in products that have not moved in three months. That number is frequently larger than founders expect, because slow leakage across many small SKUs adds up quietly.
What this list is genuinely good for
Sorted by urgency — reorder first, then low, then dead and overstock, healthy last — this becomes a short, honest to-do list instead of scrolling every product hoping to notice a problem. For a WooCommerce store with more than a handful of SKUs, that sorted view is the actual time saver, more than the forecast number itself.
What it will not do
- It will not clear dead stock for you. Knowing $2,400 is tied up in slow-moving inventory does not discount it, bundle it, or list it elsewhere — that decision and that action are yours.
- It does not know why something is not selling. Seasonality, a discontinued line, a pricing mistake, a supplier problem — the classification flags the symptom; diagnosing the cause takes a human look.
- It uses the same fixed assumptions as the forecast — a 90-day dead-stock threshold and a uniform lead time across products — so a product with an unusually long shelf life or an unusually slow-moving but intentional category (a seasonal item stocked ahead of time, for instance) may get flagged in a way that does not match your actual intent for it. Use judgement on categories that are supposed to move slowly.
What is free
The full classification system — all six labels, the dead-stock capital total, and the urgency-sorted list — is on the free plan, with no limit on the number of products analyzed.
Related reading: how the forecast is actually calculated and from forecast to purchase order.