Replenishment for WooCommerce
Replenishment for WooCommerce by Shelf Planner is an automated forecasting and replenishment engine for WooCommerce.
It helps you optimize your inventory, reduce lost sales due to stock outs and – most importantly – it helps you to make your customers happy.
What is Replenishment?
The most important retail merchandising methods for success are forecasting for demand and customer analytics. These are followed by the significance of localized product assortments, an optimized merchandising cycle, and a unified pricing/promotional structure.
Understanding customer demand is is the first step to keeping your customers happy and your store healthy, because it will reduce stock outs of your top selling items but at the same time helps you buy the right products, with the right volumes..
What is Demand Forecasting?
Demand forecasting is the process of understanding and predicting customer demand in order to make smart decisions about supply chain operations, profit margins, cash flow, capital expenditures, capacity planning, and more. Demand forecasting helps your business estimate the total sales and revenue for a future period of time, often – but not always – by looking at historical data.
The demand forecasting methodology is important for almost all businesses to avoid overproduction and underproduction. To conduct a systematic and scientific demand forecast, analysts need to determine what they’re measuring and the time perspective, select a type and method of demand forecasting, and then collect, analyze, and interpret results.
Factors Influencing Your Demand
There are a number of factors that can significantly impact demand which need to be taken into account prior to forecasting. Here are the five most common influencers impacting forecasting and demand management.
Seasonality
As seasons change, so can demand. A highly seasonal brand, or a cyclical business, may have a peak season when sales are booming followed by off-seasons when sales are steady or even very slow. Some demand forecasting examples based on seasonality include products used during specific seasons (boating gear during the summer), holidays (costumes and candy on Halloween) or events (wedding season, for example).
Geography
Where your customers reside and where you manufacture, store, and fulfill orders from can have a huge impact on inventory forecasting (not to mention shipping costs). So, it pays to be strategic when choosing geographic locations of your supply chain.
Competition
When competition enters or exits the scene, demand can drop or skyrocket. For example, if a new player enters the market and starts vying for its share of the pie, established businesses may suffer; on the other hand, if an existing competitor folds, or begins losing ground because of bad product, service, or PR, other businesses will be in greater demand as consumers make a switch.
Type of Goods
When competition enters or exits the scene, demand can drop or skyrocket. For example, if a new player enters the market and starts vying for its share of the pie, established businesses may suffer; on the Different products and services have very different demand forecasting. For example, forecasting demand for perishable goods with a short shelf-life must be very precise or a lot of inventory could be lost. On the other hand, demand can more or less be predicted for a subscription box service that’s shipped to the same customers at the same time each month (assuming customer retention and attrition are relatively steady).
How Does It Work?
Shelf Planner calculates your customer demand by using a mix of ‘classic’, proprietary forecasting algorithms and machine learning techniques.
From there, we calculate a so called ‘Ideal Stock’, which represents your safety stock based on your future demand for each product.
