Advertising and Inventory Forecasting

Today we’re going to discuss advertising and inventory forecasting.

Now you would think that those two fields are not interconnected, but we’re going to make a case today to show you how important it is to think about your inventory whilst planning your advertising campaigns.

Now a typical e-shop would be spending their money on PPC to promote direct products and you want to be sure that whilst you’re promoting you have them in your inventory on hand and you also are confident enough that you’re going to make money on selling them.

Now, why are these important? PPC campaigns are expensive, so when you use them, you want to make sure that you’re promoting products you have on hand. Otherwise, you’re wasting money.

 You spent money on attracting customers to your website only for them to find out the goods they want to buy are not available. That doesn’t make any sense does it so?

We are going to show you how our customers make the best of their campaigns while using Inventoro. In the winners and losers section of our software, what you see is your product portfolio divided into three sections;

• Winners
• Chasers
• Losers

Winners – they are your top sellers, they are the most popular products which make the most of your profits and that’s why you want to concentrate on your PPC campaigns.

Chasers – they’re the products that people buy but not so often. You still want to keep them on sale.

Losers – well there is a reason why we call them losers. That’s dead inventory. Nobody wants that inventory, that’s the stuff you need to get rid of now.

Example:

When Inventoro knows which are which, it is ready to calculate optimum orders and inventory levels. It is important for you as an owner or manager to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses within your portfolio as well.

You can differentiate your marketing strategy for top products, for those which are strongly seasonal, and for those which are declining in sales or increasing. 

You can segment your portfolio by profitability, revenue share, or sales frequency, so you can see what products you should get rid of immediately. 

We know that reducing stock levels of Losers is not as easy as it looks, but there are ways to do it. 

Like for example you can run promotions on these products, discount them, or you can try to negotiate a buyback with your supplier.

You can even include these products as a gift with every customer order. 

Inventoro mainly focuses on Winners, making sure they are always in stock while ensuring you don’t hold too much inventory in your Losers.

This can be the key to your business success 

Back to winners. They are important because they really attract your customer and we know this by data science. We take a look at your inventory, at your past sales and we can identify your winners. 

You want to take those winners, export them into an excel sheet and send that excel sheet to your advertising agency and tell them to run your PPC campaigns on those products.

Winners are not only important for your PPC campaigns, they’re also important for us because they tell us what inventory should be kept on hand. We use this category and we focus our forecasting algorithms to make sure your winners are 99% available at  ALL TIMES, that’s right 99%.

We will give you replenishment recommendations so you know when to order and what to order to keep those winners available for your campaigns.

Let’s break it down, you have your advertising agency focusing on your PPC campaigns running for your top sellers,  then you have Inventoro taking care of your inventory, making sure your winners are at hand 99% Put those two together and that’s the story of success.

If you have any questions on how we do inventory forecasting please do leave us an email.