Daily Average is the typical number of orders your account generates per day, calculated as total orders divided by total days in the period. It's a good baseline for understanding your overall order volume and planning capacity, but it treats every day the same, including slow days and no-order days, so it can smooth over important shifts in demand.
Daily Velocity looks specifically at the days a product actually shipped, and measures how many units moved on those active days: units shipped in the last 30 days divided by the number of days it shipped. Unlike Daily Average, it isn't diluted by quiet days, it reflects how fast a title is actually moving when it's moving.
Why do we need to watch both?
Daily Average tells us your overall pace. Daily Velocity tells us the intensity of demand on your active shipping days. Together, they give us an early warning system: Daily Average can look stable even while a specific title is heating up, and Daily Velocity is what catches that before it becomes a stockout.
It means your product is moving faster on the days it ships, often the first sign of a title gaining momentum (a promotion, seasonal demand, or organic growth). It could be just that you received a large bulk order and you know the trend.
It's a leading indicator, so we can flag a potential inventory gap while there's still time to act, rather than after you've already run low.