Sell-through rate measures what share of your listed inventory actually sells in a given period — it's the clearest single number for whether items are moving or accumulating.
Sell-through rate
sellThroughRate = (items sold in period ÷ items available for sale during period) × 100
Example (illustrative): If you had 80 items available for sale during a month (already-listed items plus anything newly listed that month) and sold 24 of them, sell-through rate = 24 ÷ 80 × 100 = 30%. This is an illustrative example, not a target to hit.
What counts as "available for sale"
Use items that were actively listed at some point during the period — not your total inventory including items still in the cleaning queue or not yet photographed. Including not-yet-listed items in the denominator understates the rate and makes it a measure of your intake backlog rather than your actual selling efficiency.
What a low rate actually tells you — and doesn't
- A low rate can mean pricing is too high relative to the market, not that demand doesn't exist — check individual stale items against current comparable listings before assuming the whole category is slow.
- A low rate can also mean listing quality issues (poor photos, thin descriptions) rather than a pricing problem — the listing-quality checklist is worth running against underperforming items.
- A low rate in one category doesn't necessarily mean a problem sitewide — break it down by category before drawing a conclusion (see the performance-by-category article).
- A high rate isn't automatically good either — it can mean prices are set too low, leaving profit on the table even as items move quickly.
Where this lives in ListNestly
The Analytics page computes sell-through rate directly from your actual items and sales data — no manual calculation needed once your inventory and sale records are up to date.