Lightspeed Commerce Inc., the one-stop commerce platform empowering merchants to provide the best omnichannel experiences, has officially announced the launch of several new retail features for its Lightspeed Insights solution.
According to certain reports, all these features arrive on the scene bearing an ability to build upon the company’s commitment to data-driven inventory planning and retail intelligence. More on that would reveal how the stated inflow of features is headlined by Seasonality Forecasting, which happens is capable of helping merchants view order recommendations for seasonal products based on historical sales trends, and they can do so directly within their POS platform.
Apart from that, retailers will also be able to drive even more accurate order recommendations that consider seasonal events like holidays, repetitive annual celebrations, seasonal temperature changes, major sporting events, etc. To offer more context, merchants using Lightspeed Insights with this new feature have already achieved $13,000 higher gross profit based on the typical value of inventory held by Lightspeed merchants.
Taking a deeper view of what challenges Lightspeed’s Seasonality Forecasting solution will try and address moving forward, we begin from the challenge of inaccurate forecasting. As more than 39% of merchants, from one recent Lightspeed survey, were found to demand better insights into ordering quantities, Lightspeed’s latest brainchild makes a point to enhance forecasting accuracy for seasonal peaks by analyzing past sales trends instead of just recent data.
The next challenge in line here relates to erroneous stocking decisions. Lightspeed’s survey also learnt merchants across the board spend an average of 22 hours per week on inventory tasks, and 20 hours on ordering and restocking.
Against that, thanks to automated replenishment recommendations, they will now stand a better chance at minimizing stockouts and overstocking, while simultaneously optimizing cash flow. Up until now, merchants with Lightspeed Insights have experienced 26% fewer days out of stock for top-selling items.
Another bottleneck in play is orchestrated by time-consuming manual reports. With 50% of the surveyed merchants actively desiring reduced manual effort for generating reports, Lightspeed Insights caters to them through streamlining operations, custom reporting, scheduled reports, and more.
If we look past Seasonality Forecasting, the company is set to introduce increased capabilities for the purpose of helping retailers better understand their operational challenges. An example relaying the same is rooted in its new Sales Visualizations capabilities, capabilities that make it possible for merchants to dynamically view sales trends using interactive line graphs.
Such a facility can also be expected to simplify complex data, and at the same time, help businesses compare performance over time. This, in turn, ensures they can stay ahead of market shifts and act with greater precision.
Apart from that, Lightspeed is enhancing its NuORDER’s Order Trends feature to bestow retail buyers with greater visibility into top-performing products, categories, sizes, and colors. You see, top 25 product trends and top categories in both size and color sales are understood to be all those trends which are available through NuORDER offerings.
The updated value proposition is now available to United States-based NuORDER customers.
Among other things, we ought to expand upon the given Lightspeed’s survey, which considered the opinion of more than 2,000 responses across North America, South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, the United Kingdom, and the Middle East. All these respondents, once recruited, were asked to use point of sale software to sell retail goods.
“Retailers are consistently faced with annual ebbs and flows of demand based on seasonality and trends. Traditionally retailers rely on forecasting models that utilize recent sales data, or gut intuition, which can often lead to stockouts during peak periods or excessive overstock in slower seasons,” said Dax Dasilva, Founder and CEO, Lightspeed. “Lightspeed’s new Seasonality Forecasting model changes the game by analyzing year-over-year trends to help predict demand more accurately. Merchants in key verticals like Sporting & Outdoor Goods and Home & Garden can now make smarter purchasing decisions, ensuring they have the right products at the right time.”
