Browse every topic
Retail looks different from the buying side. Sell-through rate, open-to-buy budgets, inventory turnover, and the difference between gross margin and contribution margin all matter when you’re writing a $40,000 PO. Below is every guide, feature deep-dive, integration walkthrough, and solution overview we publish - search by keyword to jump straight to what you need.
Retail concepts
What is Open-to-Buy?
The single most important number in retail buying. How OTB is calculated, why it matters, and how to manage it across categories and seasons.
What is Sell-Through Rate?
The percentage of received units that sold in a window. How to read it, what targets to set, and how to use it to plan reorders.
Purchase Order Basics
Anatomy of a PO, the difference between order date and ship-by date, landed cost, partial receipts, and what to put in writing.
Inventory Turnover Explained
What turns are, how to compute them, what a healthy turn rate looks like by category, and why turns drive cash flow.
What is GMROI?
Gross Margin Return on Investment: the margin dollars you earn for every dollar invested in inventory. Formula, benchmarks, and how to improve it.
Weeks of Supply (Weeks on Hand)
How many weeks your stock will last at the current sales rate, and how buyers use it to time reorders against lead time.
Stock-to-Sales Ratio
The planning ratio that sets your beginning-of-month inventory target and feeds open-to-buy. Formula, example, and healthy ranges.
Retail Markup vs. Margin
Markup vs. margin, keystone pricing, initial markup (IMU), and maintained markup, with the formulas and worked examples.
Reorder Point & Safety Stock
The stock level that should trigger your next order, how safety stock protects against stock-outs, and the formula.
What is Dead Stock?
How to identify aged, non-moving inventory, what it really costs, and the proven ways to clear and prevent it.
What is Landed Cost?
The true cost to get a unit on your shelf: product cost plus freight, duties, insurance, and handling, with the formula.
What is Inventory Shrinkage?
The gap between recorded and actual stock: the shrinkage formula, the main causes, typical rates, and how to reduce it.
Feature deep-dives
AI Assistant
An AI-native assistant grounded in your data with real tools for POs, inventory, vendors, products, and open-to-buy.
Purchase Orders
Multi-location POs with per-line destinations, per-line landed cost (wholesale + shipping-per-unit), partial receiving, undo on un-pushed receipts, and a complete audit trail.
Open-to-Buy Planning
Plan monthly budgets by category and location across a rolling 12-month horizon. Track commitments live and see remaining OTB against actuals.
Inventory Management
Live POS mirror at the variant + location level, with reorder rules, demand forecasts, and AI-queryable data on top.
Reorder Automation
AI-suggested reorders driven by sell-through history with one-click confirmation. Lineage forever.
Transfer Recommendations
A Transfer List report that recommends inter-location stock moves ranked by estimated margin upside. Report-only by design.
Stock Adjustments
Manual add/remove on a single variant and location, pushed to your POS as a signed delta and recorded in an append-only, reversible audit journal. Fix mistakes by reversing, never deleting.
Vendor Management
Vendors, contacts, terms, and a clean history of every PO and conversation tied to each one.
Reports & Analytics
29 pre-built reports: sell-through, dead stock, vendor performance, OTB, margin, inventory turns + GMROI + CMROI. Saved views, scheduled email, CSV / XLSX / PDF export.
Solutions by buyer type
For Boutique Retailers
A lean AI-native buying and inventory platform shaped for single-store and small-multi-store boutiques.
For Multi-Store Retailers
Multi-location POs with per-line destinations, stock-balancing transfer recommendations, and per-location open-to-buy in one workflow.
For Apparel Buyers
Size runs, color matrices, and seasonal cadence handled natively. Built for the way fashion buys.
For Footwear Buyers
Size runs, widths, and re-buying cadence tuned to footwear category math.
For Trade Show Buyers
Voice-drafted POs on the floor, multi-line and multi-location in one go. Phone-first by design.
Integration guides
Shopify Integration Guide
Two-way sync of catalog, variants, inventory, and locations with webhook-powered real-time updates.
Heartland Retail Integration Guide
Live two-way sync of items, item grids, vendors, locations, and inventory, with native PO push and real-time sales webhooks.
CSV / B2B Import Guide
Bulk-import vendor catalogs and B2B feeds via CSV, with column mapping and dedupe.
Want to apply this to your shop?
Vendee Pro turns these concepts into the buttons you click every day. Start on Basic — sell-through reports unlock on Premium, OTB on Professional.
Get Started