Demand Forecasting and Scalable Revenue Growth with Inventory Planner

Inventory Planner helps merchants streamline inventory procedures by forecasting buyer demand for thousands of products in minutes. To dive deeper on how sophisticated inventory management correlates with recouped revenue, we sat down with Jill Liliedahl, the vice president of revenue at Inventory Planner and an experienced DTC founder herself.
December 15, 2021
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Yellow background with the Tydo and Inventory Planner logos with blue text that says "Demand forecasting"

Demand Forecasting and Scalable Revenue Growth with Inventory Planner

Inventory Planner helps merchants streamline inventory procedures by forecasting buyer demand for thousands of products in minutes. Users can track KPIs across 30+ platforms, automate reordering processes, and optimize stock across multiple warehouses. 

To dive deeper on how sophisticated inventory management correlates with recouped revenue, we sat down with Jill Liliedahl, the vice president of revenue at Inventory Planner and an experienced DTC founder herself. 

When to Bring In the Pros

As Jill describes it, Inventory Planner’s core objective has always been to help merchants avoid lost revenue—filling a gap in the market for a tool that can accurately predict customer demand for upcoming restock cycles. 

As a result, the IP team empowers businesses to avoid two sunk-cost scenarios: running out of inventory (and thus potential revenue) and drowning in overstock that clogs up the broader product pipeline. 

Inventory Planner is especially helpful for younger startup teams, typically composed of experts in product development, marketing, or other consumer-facing areas, as opposed to team members who work in the “back office” and manage vendors, as Jill describes them. 

Thus, by using Inventory Planner’s platform, these growing ventures (annual revenue starting at  $1 million) can continue to direct resources to their areas of expertise, allowing Inventory Planner to save them time, confusion, and capital. 

According to Jill, early-stage businesses can typically manage a great deal of inventory by winging it in Excel spreadsheets. But after hitting the first million ceiling, brands typically find it’s time to restructure.  

They’re ready to introduce new, heavy-duty tools for efficient inventory management, rather than trying to throw more bodies at an ever-growing task. 

“Even if you’re not in dire straits with declining revenue, everybody can use this degree of efficiency and insight into managing their ecommerce inventory.” 

Right Products, Right Time

In terms of use cases for the Inventory Planner client, Jill describes three common pain points. 
  1. Running out of stock—and thus losing revenue—because they can’t work out the right numbers
  2. Wasting too much time and effort trying to predict inventory needs
  3. Sitting on too much stock sitting on warehouse shelves

Before arriving at Inventory Planner, many of these businesses are running on spreadsheets, in an attempt to calculate what stock is on hand and how much will be needed. 

But, as a former Inventory Planner user herself, Jill admits that many early, founding teams are also simply employing guesswork when forecasting. Her own barebones inventory system mainly consisted of walking around warehouses to suss out what her team needed to restock. 

Flash forward to today where these businesses are working with the IP team and are now running sophisticated formulae and inventory tracking.

As Jill puts it, regardless of annual revenue or maturity, businesses can introduce Inventory Planner to upgrade inventory operations and subsequently maximize revenue, in a way that most founders do not realize is possible beforehand. 

“We help establish or level up merchants’ inventory operations, as well as help them become more efficient at the broader process. Many don’t realize how much better off they’ll be for it.” 

Inventory Metrics Primer

When asked how brands can easily begin to optimize their inventory management, Jill mentioned two fundamental metrics to track. 

In order to best isolate and define problematic trends in your inventory management, the IP team recommends tracking the forecasted lost profit as a KPI, or the projected amount of lost revenue that’ll be incurred if a restock order isn’t placed. 

On the other end of the spectrum, as previously mentioned, brands can also identify overstock across warehouses and receive recommendations from the IP team on how best to liquidate, free up inventory, and so on. 

Jill says new clients are often taken aback by the degree of stagnant stock, or unrealized cash, they’re sitting on. 

Overall, keeping a pulse on forecasted lost profit will allow brands to regularly answer questions — from “How much will we lose without this item?” to “How much money can we redirect if we move this tied up product?” — with precise metrics, as well as jump-start the search for a solution. 

And on the other side of the same coin, the IP team advises understanding the replenishment profit on any potential reorders, essentially gauging the ROI on restocking any SKU, which helps businesses understand how funds and tasks should be delegated accordingly. 

“If you go all in on improving your inventory maintenance—whether that’s with us or not—you’ll see healthier cash flow and product turnover.” 


Checkout our roundup to learn:
  • What to pledge
  • How to improve
  • Which tools will set you up for success

Dale Wilson

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This is a classic: Let the data guide you. Go where the buyers for your products are and communicate with them on a personal level (i.e. by persona and funnel position) and nurture those relationships (past, present, and future customers). It’s possible—all through data.

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It's an honest tie between Gorgias and Klaviyo. Both tools have amazing plans for 2023 and beyond, and I'm looking forward to seeing the impact both have on their clients this year.

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Store owners tend to make assumptions about the way customers interact with their website. Most never go back and analyze their design choices to find pain points or areas of opportunity. By using heatmaps and scrollmaps, they can see where real customers are clicking and concentrating their attention. Leveraging this data, brands can start to iterate on design and make their online store experience streamlined and intuitive.

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Hotjar provides a simple way to implement heatmaps, scrollmaps, and recorded user sessions on your site, helping you acquire incredibly informative user data. Additionally, it gives you the ability to create on-site surveys, which allows you to obtain direct and often critical feedback from users about their experience.

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One of the best ways to understand your customer behavior is by using HotJar. Their heat-mapping and screen recording tools shine a light on where customers are navigating to and from on your site, where they're rage clicking and experiencing frustration, and where conversion is dropping off within real life customer journeys and flows!

Understanding your customers’ pain points via data and analytics , will allow you to work with your CRO/CX Agency to solve customer frustrations and improve conversion.

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Jimmy Aristizabal

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33% of customer service inquiries are pre-sale questions. What does this mean? If you’re not investing in customer service, you’re missing out on revenue-generating opportunities.

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The benefits of elevating your customer experience:

  • 10% to 25% increase in AOV for customers who engage with live chat pre-purchase
  • 21x higher conversion rate for customers who reach out via Live Chat or SMS compared to other site visitors
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Gorgias is our favorite Helpdesk platform. They can reduce costs by 35%, primarily by decreasing the average ticket handle time. Their machine learning algorithms are trained on millions of ecommerce-related interactions across Gorgias’ customer base and provide accurate, automated replies for the most common ecommerce inquiries. This helps our agents resolve tickets faster, which provides the customer a seamless experience.

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Trust your agency! Agencies do the same things across multiple brands and niches, so we see the trends and have the practice and experience!

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Don't be afraid of data and insights. If customers aren't clicking on your emails, try a new CTA. If your ads are driving good metrics at a small spend, start scaling. If your customers are complaining about a product, look into QA! If the data tells you something isn't working, let it go and try something else!

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I'm supposed to say Tydo, right? 😉

Rikin Diwan

Chief Growth Officer,
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A picture is worth 1,000 words. A video? Probably millions. In ecommerce that value translates into engagement, acquisition, and retention—everything you need to impact your bottom line.

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Tip

Brands need to dive deeper into understanding their customers to set themselves up for success. Conduct research to gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. By doing so, you can develop targeted strategies that will enhance customer experience and boost overall retention.

Tool

Right now I would say Gorgias. Having a good customer service tool is crucial to building strong customer relationships.

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Tip

When surveyed, about 80% of ecommerce merchants think that they are delivering a great experience to their customers. However, when the same customers are surveyed, only 8% of those customers think that they are getting a great experience from the merchant. Now, more than ever, retaining loyal customers is an essential part of any online business and you should spend time with your customers to judge their experience with your website and products and offer improvements based on that feedback.

Tool

Tydo's report cards are an essential tool, along with Klaviyo for email and SMS, Recharge for subscriptions and memberships, Okendo for reviews and surveys, Rebuy for AI driven collections and upsells, Loop for self service returns... each tool is great on their own, but their strength as the ultimate tool comes from when they are used together!

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Report Cards

Free

Report Cards is a customized glimpse into your business, delivered to your inbox for free.

Report Cards consolidates all your key metrics across platforms for an at-a-glance pulse of your business.

Discover metrics for every team member so they can stay updated with the right data on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

It's free because we believe everyone should have access to the basics.

Learn more
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Portfolio

Portfolio is a hub for analytics across multiple Shopify stores. The perfect tool for agencies.

See an aggregate view of all your data for all your stores in one place.

Make real time assessments on marketing initiatives across every storefront you manage.

Analyze the performance of one store versus another in seconds.

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