Promote Clearance Items

1 min read
updated Oct 27 2021
When you’ve got too much inventory of a given item, or have a reason otherwise to sell through inventory, a clearance promotion can be a great help! Whether you have left over items from a holiday season, a less popular color or style combination, or an item that just didn’t sell at the list price, a discount can be just the right incentive to clear that inventory out to make room for the next big thing.

Sometimes certain products or flavors don’t sell as well as we’d hoped, so before their “best before” dates come due, we sell them at a discount. We use Flair to add a custom “Clearance” badge to products in our clearance collection to promote them. Since using Flair badges, clearance items saw a 275% increase in sales, while reducing questions from customers about the discounted products.

Best For
  • Increase sales
  • Reduce inventory
Let's do it

1. Identify your Clearance products

Do in Shopify

First we need to determine which products to mark down on clearance. Typically you'll want to include products that are not selling well or to make room for a new product line (e.g., Spring Collection).

To make it easier to work with your clearance items as a group, you can add a product tag to them such as 'Clearance':

Shopify product tag

2. Create a Clearance collection

Do in Shopify

Next, let’s create an automated Shopify Collection based on the 'Clearance' product tag we added.

Shopify collection

This will make it easy for bargain hunters to see all of the clearance items in one place.

3. Offer a Clearance discount

Do in Shopify

Keep in mind that customer’s expectations assume that a Clearance sale offers a higher discount than a typical sale. With the right offer, these items should sell quickly.

To offer a discount on your clearance items in Shopify, you can use a Manual, Discount Code, Automatic or Script Editor discount.

In this example, we'll create a 30% OFF discount code for all items in the Clearance collection.

Specify the discount code:

Shopify discount code

Choose Percentage for the discount type:

Shopify discount type

Set the discount value to 30% for items in the Clearance collection:

Shopify discount value

4. Highlight the Clearance products

Do in Flair

Make your clearance items easy to find with a Flair ‘Clearance’ product badge:

Flair badge

5. Promote the Clearance Sale

Do in Flair

Create a Flair banner across the site that links to your Clearance collection:

Flair banner

Level Up!

  • Limit the time of the sale and add a countdown timer to drive urgency
  • Use a Buy X get Y (Buy 3 Get 1 Free) offer on your clearance items to sell through them even faster