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What does an out-of-stock period cost me?

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Numbers to enter
A stockout does not automatically lose every order forever. Enter the share of normal demand you expect is genuinely lost and the contribution each fulfilled order would otherwise create.

Amount the order leaves after variable costs. Enter a negative number if fulfilling the order is loss-making before fixed overhead.

Your scenario. 100% means none of the demand is delayed, backordered or substituted; 0% means all demand is recovered elsewhere or later.

Koala's Calculated Result
Contribution effect of the owner-entered lost-demand scenario.

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Add normal daily demand, contribution per fulfilled order, stockout duration and your lost-demand assumption.

Koala's Professional Opinion

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Definition and method

What this calculator answers

Model the contribution lost during a stockout using the share of demand you expect to be genuinely lost rather than assuming every unavailable order disappears.

Demand during the stockout

Estimate the normal order demand during the entered stockout period from normal daily orders × stockout days.

Worked example: your figures

The interactive result above is the worked example. Change any input and the same deterministic engine recomputes the answer; this page does not insert a generic example business or silently treat example values as a benchmark.

  • No market benchmark or outcome is silently inserted by this page.

What should I check next?

Frequently asked questions

What is a stockout cost?

Stockout cost is the profit you lose when a SKU is unavailable — daily orders × lost margin per order × stockout days. The headline number for any single out-of-stock incident; the read for the lost revenue, not just the lost units.

Stockout Cost

What's the difference between lost sales and lost profit?

MarginKoala does not assume a customer-response effect. Use the calculated economics as a boundary, then test demand, conversion, redemption, retention or basket-size assumptions with observed business data or an explicit scenario.

Stockout Cost

Should I read out-of-stock as a one-time event?

Yes — split it into the stockout period, the recovery period, and the per-day drag. A 3-day stockout at 50 lost orders/day is half a 6-day stockout at 25 — read in per-day lost-profit, not in absolute lost sales.

Stockout Cost

What's a reasonable per-stockout cost?

There is no universal numeric target for this decision. Compare the result with the business’s own economics, history, constraints and explicit target, or with a verified benchmark that matches the same metric definition and market context.

Stockout Cost

Educational use, not financial advice. Numbers are estimates for planning; consult a qualified professional before acting on them.