Clearance pricing
Clearance pricing is selling slow or leftover stock below its usual price, sometimes below what the store paid, to turn it back into cash and free up space.
How it works
A clearance price is an exit price: its goal is cash and space, not margin. The price can go below cost, and then every sale loses money before any ad is paid for.
That is why clearance products don’t belong under the account’s general target ROAS, which is set for products with a normal margin. Break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ margin, so with a margin of zero or less no ROAS makes the order profitable. The real question is how much ad spend per unit you accept to get the cash back. Our guide to clearance pricing for dead stock covers how low to go and whether to keep advertising.
Where you see it
In the Merchant Center feed, the clearance price goes into sale_price, and price keeps the full price. The sale dates go into sale_price_effective_date.
Example
Example store, not client data.
The tableware shop paid 390 for a plate set that sells for 600, a margin of 35%. On clearance at 350, each sale loses 40 before ads. At the account’s ROAS of 4.5, ads cost 350 ÷ 4.5 ≈ 78 per order. The shop gets back 350 − 78 = 272 in cash for a set that cost 390, a loss of 118 per set.
Not to be confused with
- Sale price — a temporary discount to lift demand, usually still above cost. Clearance can use the same feed attribute, but its job is to clear stock.
- Dead stock — stock that has stopped selling. Clearance pricing is one way out of it.
- Zombie products — products that spend ad budget without a sale: a fact about the ads, not the warehouse.
Right and wrong readings
- Wrong: “No sales from ads, so it is dead stock and needs a clearance price.” Right: a product with no sales from ads yet can still sell. In our study of 1.4 million products, 35.4% of products that had spent at least the cost of one conversion without a sale converted later, after a median of 2 months.
Sources
- ProductAttributes (Merchant API) —
salePriceandsalePriceEffectiveDate. Checked 2 October 2026. - GetProfit study: 1,404,808 products, 130+ stores, 13 months — share of products without sales that converted later.