Sales Forecasting for Ecommerce in 2022

We all know how important 2022 is for all retailers, so here is the latest in our series of blogs, this time on Sales Forecasting for E-commerce in 2022. Our long-term goal continues to be to help small and medium-sized e-shops be more competitive and increase profitability. But before we get to the details, let’s talk about 2020 and what happened in e-commerce.

If there’s one word that defines our customers and is reflected in their data in 2020, it’s Growth. E-commerce skyrocketed last year. That’s great news for e-shops in general, but it makes sales forecasting much more difficult.

For example:

In the chart where our software Inventoro shows your sales data, we see sales at a steady level before the pandemic. Then, quite suddenly, when the pandemic starts there is a sharp increase in sales. No surprise there, we all lived it and saw it with our own eyes. But this sudden shift in the sales environment makes forecasting future sales significantly harder.

Just what happened here?  

There was rapid growth, yes, but that doesn’t change the reality that if you want to do a proper forecast with reliable results, you have to analyze your historical data to understand and predict what will happen in the future. That’s just the way sales forecasting works; all sales forecasts in the world work like that.

What makes this year tricky is that when you look back, you might assume that the numbers will continue to grow even more. However, when we are finally able to get over this pandemic situation, your sales numbers may stop growing, or level off and stabilize, or maybe they’ll even continue to grow. … You just don’t know, do you?

But this is your business, this is your life. This definitely shouldn’t be a guessing game.

At Inventoro, we have algorithms that look two years back in sales history, but we also have our own algorithm that we call fast adapt.

Fast adapt evaluates micro-movements that happen on a day-to-day basis. So when there is a sudden fluctuation in sales, either up or down, we identify that movement and immediately change our sales forecast accordingly.

That’s how we can be confident that Inventoro will be able to predict, with a greater level of accuracy than you or anyone else can, what your sales results are going to be in the future. Inventoro provides a dual view of sales, a longer term view and a micro view, which we combine to provide you with the highest quality results. 

2020 was a great year for e-commerce, and if you’re an e-commerce company that was able to adapt quickly, you had a great year. The downside, if there is one, is what comes next. The pandemic has made sales forecasting challenging and complicated. Will e-commerce continue to grow as consumers move, slowly but surely, away from brick and mortar shops to buying on-line, or will things go back to normal? By looking at past sales from both a micro and macro perspective, Inventoro will help you predict your future sales much more accurately than just hoping and guessing.