Category: Demand planning

Demand forecasting is hard enough when you have years of sales data to work with. When you're launching a brand new product — one that has never been sold before — you're working with nothing. No trendline to extrapolate. No seasonality to account for. No historical velocity to build from.

For ecommerce brands, Q4 is the year in miniature. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Holiday gifting. The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas can represent anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of annual revenue for some brands — compressed into a matter of weeks. Get it right and you finish the year strong. Get it wrong and you spend Q1 recovering from stockouts, excess inventory, and the ranking damage that comes with both.

Demand planning has always been important in ecommerce, but in recent years, it has become significantly harder to get right.

Consumer demand moves faster than ever. A product can suddenly spike because of a TikTok video, a creator mention, or a successful ad campaign. Seasonal trends shift unexpectedly. Marketplace algorithms change overnight. At the same time, ecommerce brands are managing inventory across more channels, more SKUs, and more fulfillment locations than ever before.

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.