Forecasting for holiday season

How Inventory Planner forecasts sales for Black Friday and Christmas

Monica avatar
Written by Monica
Updated over a week ago

Items using non-seasonal forecasting methods ("Recent sales and trends" and "Last sales") can still see a spike in demand due to holidays. Inventory Planner takes spikes in sales due to holidays into account in two ways:

  1. Exclude sales for holidays for consecutive months

  2. Apply a seasonal increase for non-seasonal products for Black Friday and Christmas

These methods are discussed in further detail below.

Exclude sales for holidays for consecutive months

Spikes in sales for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend and the week before Christmas could cause the forecast for the following weeks and months to be overstated.

For example, if 500 units of an item are purchased during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend when the normal sales velocity is 100 units per month, then the forecasted demand for January could be too high.

The Excluded sales section in Account > Settings > Forecast allows you to set which dates should be excluded from the forecast calculation. Actual sales will still be reported - this exclusion is only for the purposes of forecasting.
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Apply seasonal increase for non-seasonal products for Black Friday and Christmas

When the "Apply seasonal increase for non-seasonal products" option is set, Inventory Planners will take holiday sales seasons (including Black Friday and Cyber Monday) into account for items that are non-seasonal.
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To do so, we check the previous year's sales in the months of November and December and if increases are detected, they're automatically applied to your future forecast for the holiday period in the current year.
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Using override forecasts

If you set a forecast override, Inventory Planner won't apply any increases automatically to avoid a potential spike in sales forecasting.

If you make use of sales increase percentages, we recommend disabling the option to automatically consider holiday seasons under Account > Settings > Forecast.

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