Category: Demand planning

Still using Excel for inventory planning?It’s holding your business back. From lost sales to wasted time, the hidden costs of manual inventory management add up fast. Here's what you're missing, and how Flieber can help you turn things around.

The Hidden Costs of Sticking with Excel

• Lost Sales Due to Stockouts: Research shows that brands lose an average of 8% in sales due to stockouts—for example, if your business has $10M in annual sales, that’s $800,000 in lost revenue.
• Trapped Cash in Overstock: Excess inventory ties up capital and increases storage...

If modern retailers know one thing, it’s that no matter how hard you plan, things almost always work out differently than expected. And nowhere is that more true than with your supply chain.

Suppliers, vessels, trucks, warehouses. Supply chains are complex and chaotic by nature. To solve the disconnects between your forecasts and what actually happens on the road, water, or factory floor, you need to be able to act and react as quickly as possible.

The good news is, there’s never been more data available to help you do that. With AI’s ability to crunch...

From Amazon to Shopify and beyond, no matter which corner of commerce you operate in, you lose sales when your products go out of stock.

Every year, retailers lose an estimated $1.8 trillion due to inventory mismanagement. That’s roughly 7.8% of total global retail sales.

At Flieber, our team has onboarded over 3 million SKUs. We’ve found that the number for this subset of products is even more drastic: our calculations point to an average of 11.2% in lost sales. 

To understand the impact of these numbers on your own business, let me tell you the tale...

For certain retailers, the publicity you can garner when a viral product is low in stock is more precious than gold. But for most, not having enough inventory has the opposite effect. 

Lost sales and increased inventory costs are just some of the risks involved with putting e-commerce products on backorder. But what many retailers don’t realize is that it is possible to get the best of backordering, using it to increase sales while maintaining inventory control.

In this guide, we'll reveal the benefits of backordering in the current e-commerce climate...

Every day, in every media outlet, you’ll see articles discussing retail companies with overstock inventory. Even large brands are still working to balance their inventory levels post pandemic, with 66% of owners and executives reporting overstocks.

To solve this problem, brands often fall back on what they do best: drive more sales. 

Markdowns, promotions, and clearance sales are the default methods for offloading excess inventory. But these approaches can have a major impact on your margins.

The truth is, profitable scaling starts long before the point...

According to some estimates, there are over 12 million e-commerce companies worldwide. In other words, the landscape is crowded. 

There’s a reason Excel is the go-to forecasting tool for countless brands and merchants. It’s flexible, affordable, and you already know how to use it.

The ecommerce world is changing faster than you can say “unified omnichannel experience." 

Customers demand better visibility, stronger brand values, and compliance with key sustainability practices. Yet inventory stockouts and supply chain setbacks are still a regular (and expensive) challenge for modern retailers.

To scale successfully, brands need lean, agile inventory planning systems that can adapt to any demand fluctuation, market phenomenon, or natural disaster.

In this article, we’ve rounded up some of the top ecommerce trends that could have...

If the rapid growth of the e-commerce industry has taught us anything, it’s that consumer demand can fluctuate wildly for even the simplest of reasons, throwing off your inventory forecasting.

Before Covid-19 upended society, the direct-to-consumer (DTC) market was experiencing a period of significant momentum. The number of brands launching in the space multiplied daily, as the lucrativeness of high-profit margins inspired new entrants. Interest from consumers was at an all-time high as they sought to take advantage of better pricing and product quality.