Stock-Aware Ads
by
Inventory-linked ad control for ecommerce teams: watch stock cover against live spend per product, then pause or keep traffic flowing before the budget outruns the warehouse.
Ad platforms do not know what you have in stock. A product feed updates on its own schedule, a campaign keeps delivering against a SKU with four days of cover, and the spend continues right up to the moment the product page starts turning shoppers away. The reverse costs just as much: a product with fourteen weeks of cover sitting in a paused ad set nobody remembered to restart. This skill watches stock cover and sell-through per product against live ad spend, and returns the pauses and the restarts, sized so paid never runs further ahead of the warehouse than you allow.
What It Does
- Joins live inventory and sell-through to ad spend at product level.
- Projects days of cover remaining at the current spend and conversion rate.
- Flags products whose spend will exhaust stock before the next delivery.
- Finds products with excess cover sitting in paused or throttled campaigns.
- Sizes a throttle rather than a full pause where cover is merely tight.
- Returns the pauses, throttles and restarts per ad set with the cover behind each.
Use Cases
- Stop spending into a SKU that runs out before the weekend.
- Restart the ad set on a product that has fourteen weeks of cover.
- Throttle rather than pause where cover is tight but a delivery is inbound.
- Keep the product feed from selling what the warehouse cannot ship.
Example Session
Which product ads should be paused or restarted based on stock?
Three ad sets need throttling or pausing, and one should be restarted.
- Product | Cover | Spend/day | Days to zero | Next PO | Action
- Trail runner, core | 6 days | $310 | 4 | Nov 18 | Throttle to $120
- Insulated flask | 2 days | $95 | 2 | None | Pause now
- Base layer, navy | 14 weeks | $0 | n/a | n/a | Restart, was paused in June
- Rain jacket | 9 weeks | $240 | 61 | Dec 2 | No change
The trail runner has six days of cover and spend that empties it in four, with a delivery on Nov 18: throttling to $120 stretches cover past the delivery rather than pausing a campaign that is working. The flask has no purchase order behind it and should stop today. The base layer has been paused since June with fourteen weeks of cover, which is the most expensive line on this list.
Why This Beats Prompting It Yourself
A Feed Update vs Cover Against Spend: The Hidden Risk
A generic prompt can check what is out of stock, which is the easy half and always too late. What it cannot do is project how many days of cover the current spend leaves, notice that a delivery lands before the stock runs out, or find the product with fourteen weeks of cover sitting in an ad set paused four months ago. All three cost money quietly.
When You Still Need The Throttle Rather Than The Pause
Pausing a working campaign is expensive, and so is emptying the shelf before the delivery. This skill states six days of cover against spend that empties it in four, with a purchase order on day twelve, and sizes the throttle that bridges the gap. The restarts come from the same view, and they are usually where the recovered revenue is.
Known Limitations
Days to zero assumes the current conversion rate holds, which is reliable over a week and less so across a promo. It needs product level attribution between ad sets and SKUs, so campaigns targeting a whole catalog are handled at collection level and labeled. It produces the pauses, throttles and restarts and does not apply them in the ad accounts.
Install It
- Download the ZIP.
It is free and there is no account to create. - Unzip it into your agent's skills folder.
Claude Code reads ~/.claude/skills/, which is hidden by default: the command in the folder block opens it. Other agents scan their own directory, so drop the same folder there instead. - Ask your agent to use it.
Restart the agent if it was already running, then it picks the skill up with no config.
skills folder
Copy
~/.claude/skills/stock-aware-ads/
SKILL.md
references/cover-model.md
actions/
# pauses, throttles and restarts per run
# macOS: create the folder and open it in Finder
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && open ~/.claude/skills
# Windows: paste in the Explorer address bar
%USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\Frequently asked questions
How is this different from pausing ads when stock hits zero?
Zero is too late: the spend that emptied the shelf was already wasted, and the last day of it bought clicks to a page that could not convert. This projects days to zero against current spend and throttles ahead of it, which keeps the campaign alive and the stock intact.
Which agents does the skill run in?
Any agent that supports the open SKILL.md format: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Manus, Grok and others load it unmodified. The format is portable, the location is not. Each agent scans its own skills directory, so you drop the same folder into whichever one yours uses. There is no config file to edit and no API key to provision.
What does it need connected to work?
Live inventory per SKU, sell-through, open purchase orders, and ad spend with product level attribution. Without purchase orders it still throttles on cover, and treats every tight product as having no delivery inbound, which is the safe assumption.
Why throttle instead of pausing?
Because a paused campaign loses its delivery position and takes time to recover it, and most cover problems are timing problems that a delivery resolves. Where no delivery is inbound and cover is genuinely short, the recommendation is a full pause.
Does it restart campaigns too?
Yes, and that is usually where the money is. Ad sets paused during a stock-out are rarely restarted when the stock returns, and a product sitting on fourteen weeks of cover with zero spend behind it is a larger loss than most of the pauses.
What is included with the skill?
The skill itself, the cover model reference, the action queue format, and the throttle sizing rules. It is free and security scanned. We re-publish the ZIP when the cover model changes, so download it again if your throttles start looking wrong.
Paid should never outrun what the warehouse can ship.
Polar joins live inventory to ad spend in one semantic layer, so traffic stops at the SKU before budget burns on an out-of-stock page.
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