Question about forecast

  • Resolved miikewordpress

    (@miikewordpress)


    2 years, 1 month ago

    Hello,

    Our stock ordering work has become very complicated on Excel with lots of formulas. So I wish to use this plugin and I think it’s a very promising plugin.

    There’s a question about forecasting.
    I have looked at the analysis and it seems like for products that had steady sales, the forecast seems quite accurate.

    But we sometimes order a new product in a small quantity to test market, say, 50 pieces. Then sometimes it’s sold out very quickly like in 5 days. When we do manual forecasting we would see this product having the potential to sell around 10 pieces per day or 300 per month.
    I’m not sure how this plugin forecasts this product’s sales. I have a feeling that it counts as 50 sold per month or per year.

    Because we have a high sales product that got sold out very quickly last year and this product’s stock got replenished just 2 weeks ago and it sold 170 pieces already. But the plugin’s dashboard says this product has 170 Sales L4W and 80 Forecast L4W which I think a bit far from the reality.
    Beause 170 sales was in L2W and forecast should be at least 340 L4W.

    I’m not expert this kind of algorhithm but I think maybe the forecast number should be calculated based on the number of days that a product was available.
    What I mean is if a product was sold 50 in 5 days and it was only available for 5 days then the potential sales should be 10 per day or about 300 L4W not 50 L4W.

    Or is there any configuration that I’m missing?

    Thank you.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Shelf Planner

    (@shelfplanner)

    Hi

    thanks for your comment and you’re right, these numbers seem a bit off. But I think there might be an explaination for this;

    We use different algorithms depending on the age or lifecycle of the products. The choice for which algorithm to use is mainly driven by the date that is set for what we call ‘product launch date’.

    Initially, we use the WooCommerce ‘publish date’ (see screenshot above) to determine the Product Launch Date, but you can overwrite these dates in the Product management pages:

    It can happen that these dates are set to 1970.01.01, for example if you have uploaded products into WooCommerce tables from one database to another.

    In that case, the engine picks these items up as products with an extremely long lifecycle and the forecast will be too low. Updating the Product Launch Date should in this case do the trick.

    On out merchant support site, you can find some more information on how the forecast is calculated and what parameters you can change to impact the results: https://merchants.shelfplanner.com/faq/

    I hope this answers your question. Please let us know if you have any other thoughts ??

    Plugin Author Shelf Planner

    (@shelfplanner)

    Hi,

    I could see the forecast has been update now, hope it is more in line.

    please let us know if you have any further questions or thoughts, we’re happy to help.-

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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