This method note is from the Flowup Insights Team for people who have to commit inventory to a 7-Eleven Thailand promotion. It is not a warehousing manual and it is not a copy of a site explainer.
The meeting often starts with a store count and a date range, and only later asks how many cartons to move. That order hides the real commitment. Once you agree the width of the promotion, you have also agreed to put a large amount of stock into stores or into a buffer that will be hard to unwind if shoppers do not pick the product up. Agree the stock figure in the same meeting as the store list, or do not sign the store list.
Build the stock number from a daily rate, not from a round carton total
Start with a daily sales rate you are willing to defend for stores that will actually have the offer and the stock. That rate should come from recent sell-out in comparable stores, not from a hoped-for lift written on a slide. Multiply by the number of participating stores, by the number of days the offer will truly run, and by a safety margin you can explain. Then convert to cartons so the warehouse and the distributor are looking at the same quantity.
A rounded "two cartons a store" figure feels tidy and is usually wrong. A store that sells half a unit a day and a store that sells three units a day should not receive the same promotional pile. If you only have a chain average, say so, and treat the stock plan as a hypothesis you will revise after the first week, not as a shipment you cannot touch.
Use stores that will be in stock, not stores that were approved on paper. A promotion that is booked for a thousand stores and stocked in six hundred is not a thousand-store promotion. It is a six-hundred-store promotion with a gap that will show up as missed volume and as out-of-stocks in the stores you told the buyer you would cover.
Keep sell-in and sell-out on two lines
The stock you ship into the chain is not the stock shoppers buy. If you only watch shipments, a large promotional receipt can look like success in week one and like a near-expiry problem six weeks later. Write both numbers on the approval page: units to prepare, and the daily sell-out you need in order for that stock to move before it becomes a return or a markdown.
If the implied daily sell-out is clearly above anything those stores have done, shrink the store list or shorten the days before you commit the cartons. Adding a bigger safety margin on top of an unreachable daily rate does not make the plan safer. It makes the leftover stock larger.
Hypothetical example, for method only: 800 stores, a target of 0.8 units per store per day, 14 promotion days and a 20 percent safety margin is about 10,752 units. If that pack is 12 units a carton, that is 896 cartons. Replace every figure with your own before you use the result. Do not adopt the example as a target.
Open the sales per store per day, promotion stock and marketing break-even calculator and type your store count, daily target, days and pack size. The same page also turns a marketing budget into the extra units you must sell. Defaults are hypothetical. Nothing you type is sent or stored.
Write down what happens to leftover stock
An approval is incomplete if it only names the outbound quantity. Add one line for who holds leftover units, how long you will leave them on shelf after the offer ends, and who pays for a markdown if they do not move. Without that line, you have agreed a shipment, not a promotion.
If you cannot yet name a daily rate with any evidence, do not book a wide store list "to be stocked later." Book a smaller, measurable set of stores, move a stock quantity those stores can actually sell, and only then discuss a wider second wave.
Flowup Insights Team · method note for promotion stock commitments in 7-Eleven Thailand
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