Available to Sell (ATS)
Available to sell is on-hand inventory plus confirmed on-order, minus units already committed — the stock a brand can still promise to a new order.
Available to sell (ATS) is the inventory a brand can still promise to a new order: units on hand, plus confirmed units on order, minus everything already committed. It is the difference between what the warehouse holds and what is actually free to sell — and the two diverge as soon as a season starts trading.
ATS = On Hand + On Order − Commitments
What counts as a commitment
The subtraction is where ATS lives or dies. Commitments typically include confirmed wholesale orders not yet shipped, units reserved against replenishment programs, stock ring-fenced for the brand's own DTC channel, and allocations already released to doors. On the addition side, on-order should mean confirmed production with a believable delivery date — a purchase order slipping in the factory inflates ATS with units that will not arrive in time to honor the promises made against them, which is why ATS accuracy depends on production visibility as much as on warehouse counts.
ATS in wholesale: the at-once list
In apparel wholesale, ATS is a selling document, not just a metric. The ATS list — the styles, colors, and sizes free for immediate shipment — is what sales reps work from for at-once orders: in-season purchases outside the prebook, placed by retailers chasing what is selling. A clean ATS list turns excess position into revenue at close to full wholesale price. An overstated one does the opposite: orders get confirmed against units that are already promised or still in production, and the shortfall surfaces weeks later as cut lines and a damaged fill rate on the accounts the brand most wants to keep.
ATS in DTC and blended channels
A brand selling both wholesale and DTC usually sells from one inventory pool, and ATS is the mechanism that stops the pool being promised twice. The DTC site's availability, the replenishment reserve for key accounts, and the at-once list all draw down the same units, so each channel's ATS has to reflect the others' commitments in something close to real time. When it does not, the failure is always the same shape: two channels sell the last of a size run in the same week, and one of them un-sells it.
ATS vs on-hand
On-hand answers "what do we have"; ATS answers "what can we still sell." A style can show hundreds of units on hand and an ATS of zero — or below zero, when confirmed orders exceed supply, which is an early warning that buy execution and production need to close the gap before ship windows open.
ATS is a point-in-time number that decays fast during selling periods. An ATS list generated weekly from a spreadsheet is already stale when it reaches a rep's inbox; the value of the list is proportional to how recently the commitments in it were true.
RetailNorthstar computes ATS from live on-hand, confirmed production, and channel commitments in one model, so at-once selling and DTC availability draw from the same truth. See how RetailNorthstar handles allocation and channel commitments →