How to Build a Strategy for Selling Off Old Collections: Promodo's Experience

For fashion retail, selling off old collections is a routine task. At the end of a season, hundreds of items remain in warehouses and need to be sold off to make room for new arrivals. The solution usually seems obvious: increase discounts, turn on advertising, and scale up traffic.

In practice, however, this approach often creates new problems for the business. What's more, in large eCommerce projects, old collections can end up competing with new ones not only for customers' attention, but also for the attention of advertising algorithms.

In this article, together with Promodo's PPC specialists, we explain why standard sales don't always work and what mechanics you can use instead.

How Google Ads Logic Works

Modern advertising algorithms learn from historical data. If a product has generated sales for several seasons in a row, the system starts to consider it more reliable and gives it priority in impressions more often. Another problem is that for the algorithm, the main criterion for allocating the budget is the probability of conversion, not profitability.
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Let's imagine two models of sneakers. The first belongs to the new collection and has a high profit margin. The second is leftover stock from previous seasons that has already been running in ad campaigns for several years.

The new model brings in $85 of profit per sale and sells 10 times a month. Total profit comes to $850. The old model sells 20 times a month, but the profit per sale is only $12. As a result, the business earns only $240 in profit.

From the system's perspective, this is entirely logical. If a certain product consistently generates sales, there's no reason to reduce its share of ad impressions in favor of new items for which there isn't yet enough data.

Common Mistakes in Building a Sales Strategy

Many brands still use the same scenario: announce a large sale, launch additional budget, and lower prices on the maximum number of products. But in practice, this strategy reduces campaign profitability and affects sales in the long run.

Mistake #1. Mass Discounts Without Considering the Product Mix

Discounts are often applied to all products regardless of their role in the assortment. As a result, the company ends up stimulating sales of items that would have sold anyway, even without extra promotions.

Mistake #2. Promoting Old and New Collections the Same Way

If old and new collections are promoted within the same ad campaigns, they become equal for the algorithm, even though from the business's perspective they may have completely different value.

As a result, new collections start competing with old ones not only for buyers' attention, but also for the advertising budget.

Mistake #3. Evaluating Campaigns Using ROAS Alone

ROAS remains one of the most popular metrics in eCommerce, but it doesn't cover product profit margins. An ad campaign can show excellent results in terms of return on ad spend while still not generating profit.

That is why more and more international retailers are shifting from optimizing for revenue to optimizing for profit, taking into account not just the fact of a sale, but its real value to the business.

How to Build a System for Selling Off Old Collections

1. The first step is to separate the logic for promoting new and old collections. If all products sit within a single advertising system without additional priorities, the algorithms naturally start gravitating toward items with the longest history.
2. The second step is to add business metrics into the advertising ecosystem. Advertising should take into account not just product category, brand, or price, but also indicators that directly affect the business's economics: profit margin, stock levels, seasonality, or the stage of the product's life cycle.
3. The third step is to create a separate workflow for selling off remaining stock. Old collections don't need to be removed from advertising activity entirely. On the contrary, they can still generate additional revenue, but they should have separate campaigns, separate KPIs, and a separate approach to budget management built around them.

Add Automation

During sales, the assortment is constantly changing: some products sell out, others lose relevance for the main campaigns, and prices get updated. If all these processes are managed manually, the team spends more and more time on operational tasks instead of developing strategy. Automation takes over instead.

• Managing the product life cycle. Some items may lose relevance for the main ad campaigns, while others may need separate promotion scenarios or additional support for selling off remaining stock. Automation makes it possible to apply different rules to products depending on their age, status, seasonality, or other parameters.
• Scaling ad campaigns. For large catalogs, manually creating and updating campaigns quickly turns into a heavy operational load. Automation helps work with thousands of products at once and keep campaigns up to date without constant manual intervention.
• Updating ad creatives. During sales, prices, promotions, and stock levels can change frequently. Syncing ad messaging with catalog data helps avoid situations where a user sees outdated information in an ad.

At Promodo, to solve these kinds of tasks, we use our own automation tools, which help manage large catalogs even amid constant changes in the assortment.
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Which Mechanics Work Best for Selling Off Old Collections

There's no one-size-fits-all scenario, but in practice, a few approaches work best.

Category-based sales let you concentrate demand around specific seasonal product groups. Brand-based sales are effective for audiences that already have established demand for a particular manufacturer. Dynamic product campaigns help automatically work with large catalogs without constant manual updates.

‍It's also worth highlighting mechanics aimed at increasing average order value. Instead of continuously increasing the discount on a specific product, a business can encourage customers to add more items to their cart. This approach often has a positive effect on both average order value and overall sales economics.

Conclusion

The larger the assortment grows, the more important it becomes to control not just which products sell, but which products get priority within the advertising system.

That's why the most effective sales strategies are no longer built around the biggest discount. They're built around data, automation, and the ability to manage how algorithms distribute attention between old and new collections.
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