Flywheel’s Inventory Optimization lets you review your trending products and customize when you want to be alerted about changes. The Rate of Sale calculations utilize your product’s past performance and current sales to identify trends. Use this data to quickly identify areas to adjust your inventory levels with the merchants as well as highlighting advertising spend opportunities to adjust budgets, ACoS targets, targeting, etc. to lean into positive movers to maximize performance or pull back on areas where ad investment can be reduced to improve efficiency.

Rate of Sale - Watch Video

This option takes the guesswork out of defining when a change in rate of sale is relevant. Turn on the option by selecting “Anomaly Detection” and Flywheel reviews historical data removing statistical noise to return the top most relevant positive and negative movers in the past two weeks.

Current trending sales refers to the most recent 2 weeks over the Baseline of 30 days prior. For example; if the most recent two weeks are Oct 1 - 15; the Baseline reflects Sept 1 - 30.

Name your query and save - having notifications turned on will alert you via email when new products meet this criteria.

This option empowers you to find specific changes in rate of sale to dive deeper into your product’s historical sales data.

Selection in the ‘when’ category offers selection by two options, either:

Deviation = the calculated difference in the Rate of Sale or

Units sold per day = change in the Rate of Sale by units sold per day

Customize your current time range, and the baseline will adjust automatically:

If you choose to look at the past 30 days; this will compare to 60 days prior to that range. For example, if the current period is Sept 1 - 30; baseline would be July 1 - Aug 31.

This enables you to restrict the results by setting thresholds on the number of products that sell a certain number of units per day in a month. The use of threshold is optional to help reduce the inclusion of low selling products.

For example; apply to products selling less than 2 units / specified time period will exclude any product selling under this amount and results only appear for products with more than 2 units / specified time period

Name your query and apply - the query snapshot will return the current results so you can adjust the levels accordingly. This name will appear on your card in the homepage for Insights and in your email alert. You can adjust the name and query metrics at any time.

Here this alert is looking for products that in the current period compared to baseline, for products' Rate of Sale that changed to now be selling less than 5 units per day

In my example, these 3 products had the largest change in the past month compared to the baseline period -
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The first product was selling nearly 0 a day (0.03) from Dec- Feb with 2 total units sold - however, in the past month that has increased by 11400% to almost 4 units a day (3.83) - this product is flagged as meeting the criteria that the change was < 5.

Alternatively, selecting the column "units sold per day" to sort my results, I can find my biggest decrease; with a product that was selling nearly 30 a day, now trending at almost 9.

Note, even if no results are currently returning with the intended criteria, by creating a customized card with enabled email alerts, you will be notified when a product meets these thresholds you’ve set.

What does this mean for your advertising strategy? Knowing what products are trending and if you are advertising them with the selection of the "Active Campaigns" or use of the slide over lets you know if and where an item is advertised.

Items unadvertised that are trending well may be good candidates for an expansion of advertising strategy; and those showing decrease in sales may be items to pull back on. Combining this data with your demand forecast and how many days of inventory remaining will help you make decisions about your product's over all strategy.