Reference
Off-price and sourcing glossary
Thirty terms that appear in closeout contracts, earnings calls and supply agreements, defined in plain language. Each links to a fuller explanation.
The Retail Ledger · Updated September 27, 2026
- Approved accounts
- A list of retailers to which a closeout buyer is permitted to resell, named in the disposal agreement.
- ATS (Available to Sell)
- The seller's own report of inventory offered for sale, by style, color, size and quantity.
- Bin store
- A retailer that sells unsorted surplus from open bins at a price that falls each day of the cycle.
- Chargeback
- An amount a retailer deducts from a supplier payment, attached to a reason code.
- Comparable sales
- Sales measured across the same store base year over year, excluding new and closed locations.
- Consignment
- An arrangement in which the supplier retains title until the goods are sold.
- DDP
- Delivered duty paid: the seller bears cost and risk, including duties, to the named destination.
- De-branding
- Removing labels and identifying marks as a condition of resale.
- Discrepancy notice
- A written report of differences between what was ordered and what arrived, due within a contractual window.
- Diverter
- A buyer who resells legitimately acquired goods into channels the brand did not authorize.
- Firm sale
- A sale in which the buyer takes title on delivery and pays whether or not the goods sell.
- FOB
- Free on board: risk and freight pass to the buyer once goods are loaded at the origin port.
- Impairment
- Recognition that inventory cannot be sold for its carrying cost, charged to the income statement.
- Landed cost
- Total cost to get a unit to destination: invoice price plus freight, insurance, duty and handling.
- Manifested lot
- A liquidation lot sold with an itemized list of contents.
- Net realizable value
- Estimated selling price less the estimated costs of completion and of making the sale.
- Off-price
- Retail model built on buying surplus and closeout goods opportunistically rather than planned assortments.
- Open-to-buy
- Budget deliberately left uncommitted so a buyer can act on opportunities mid-season.
- OTIF
- On time in full: a retailer metric scoring whether deliveries arrive in window and complete.
- Overplanned
- Having committed more units to a category before the season than demand justified.
- Packaway
- Merchandise bought in one season and warehoused for release in a later one.
- Preference
- A payment received before a bankruptcy filing that may be recoverable by the estate.
- Prepack
- A carton with a fixed, declared assortment of sizes repeated across every carton of that pack code.
- Reclamation
- A supplier's right, in narrow circumstances, to demand return of goods delivered shortly before a filing.
- Release
- A contractual provision extinguishing claims, sometimes including claims not yet identified.
- Sell-through
- The share of a buy sold within a period; the cleanest measure of whether a plan was right.
- Shrink
- The gap between recorded inventory and a physical count, containing theft, damage and error.
- Size break
- The point at which a size stops selling at the same rate as the rest of a style.
- Size curve
- The planned distribution of units across sizes within a style.
- Weeks of supply
- Inventory expressed as how long it would last at the current rate of sale.
Free to reuse with attribution. Everything here is defined at greater length in the resources index.