Price Drops

What a Price Drop Is

A price drop is the conversation you were already having with your vendors, made routine and written down. A lot of their product has been on your shelf too long. You want to mark it down to move it, and you want them to cover part of that markdown — because clearing it protects both of you, and the alternative is that it sits there until it's worth nothing.

The difference between a price drop and an inventory aging credit is when the vendor finds out. An aging credit is calculated after the fact: the product aged, you discounted it, and the credit recovery engine bills their share on the monthly memo. A price drop is the same dollar, asked for in advance. You send the request, the vendor says yes, and their yes is on the record before you touch the shelf price.

Why Bother Asking First

Because the answer shows up on the credit memo. Aged markdowns are split into two sections on the monthly memo:

Both are billed. The point of asking is not to unlock the credit — it's to stop the argument before it starts. A vendor who already told you in writing that they'd cover half of a markdown on a 90-day-old lot rarely disputes it sixty days later.

Finding What to Ask About

Open Price Drops in the retailer portal. It opens on the Opportunities tab, which does the hunting for you: every wholesale package across every vendor that has crossed its aging threshold and is still on your shelf, sorted so the worst offenders are on top. Packages already covered by an open request are filtered out, so you're never looking at the same lot twice.

From there, one click sends the ask. You can adjust the proposed shelf price and the share you're asking the vendor to cover before it goes out, or send it as-is.

What Happens After You Send

The vendor gets an email with a direct link to review and approve — they don't need to go hunting through their portal for it. From there:

1. They approve. The request goes active and every qualifying sale from the effective date forward lands in the approved section of the memo.
2. They decline. The request closes. Aged sales still qualify for the ordinary aging credit; you just don't have their yes.
3. They go quiet. After five business days the platform sends one reminder — exactly one, never a drip campaign.
4. They stay quiet. After ten business days the request moves to awaiting your review and shows up in your digest. You either confirm it yourself, which records the markdown as agreed on your authority, or you dismiss it.

If a vendor belatedly replies after all that, their approval still wins and is recorded as theirs.

When You Already Have Their Yes

Most of these agreements happen in a text message or a hallway at a trade show, not in a portal. If your buyer already has the vendor's approval, record it directly instead of sending a request the vendor has to answer twice — note how they approved, and the request goes active immediately. The evidence path exists so the system matches how the deal actually got made.

Setting Your Thresholds

The Aging Thresholds tab controls when a package becomes old enough to count. Defaults are category-aware, because flower goes stale far faster than an edible:

Your own rules override the defaults, and the most specific rule wins:

SKU > vendor > category > default

A rule on one SKU beats a rule on that vendor, which beats a rule on the whole category. Full detail on how the credit itself is calculated lives in Inventory Aging Credits.

Getting the Shelf Price Right

The Opportunities tab shows what each SKU is currently selling for so you can judge how far to drop it. That price comes from your menu — use Refresh prices from Dutchie to upload a current inventory export and the list updates. Without it, the platform estimates from recent sales, which is fine for triage but worth refreshing before you send a batch of asks with specific prices in them.

What You Control

All of it, and it takes effect immediately. You set the thresholds, the target margin, and the coverage rate you're asking vendors to meet. A request can carry its own rate that overrides your default for that agreement specifically — and if you leave it blank, an approved request never recovers less than it would have if the vendor had ignored you.

ShelfSpace does not broker the arrangement. You and your vendor agree to whatever you agree to, directly. The platform finds the aged inventory, sends the ask, tracks the answer, does the math, and puts it on the memo. See the credit memo approval process for how the vendor's response to the memo itself is handled.

One Guardrail Worth Knowing

An aged sale that carried one of your discounts — loyalty, employee, or another retailer-run POS program — is excluded from the unapproved aging credit. Vendors don't fund your loyalty program. A recorded price-drop agreement is different: the vendor agreed to cover that markdown, so the agreement holds regardless of what else was attached to the sale.