IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/orinte/v52y2022i4p379-389.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Predictive Analytics Improves Sales Forecasts for a Pop-up Retailer

Author

Listed:
  • Marlene A. Smith

    (Business Analytics, Business School, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado 80217)

  • Murray J. Côté

    (Department of Health Policy and Management, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843)

Abstract

Pop-up retailing involves short bursts of novel product offerings that are quickly withdrawn from the market. We describe an industry/university collaboration designed to improve sales forecasting for an organization that has adopted pop-up retailing as its exclusive business model. Early in the company’s history, the generation of sales forecasts relied heavily on expert opinion, a method that resulted in costly overstock of merchandise inventory. Accordingly, the organization developed a test market protocol in which small numbers of items are sold during a test market period to gauge future demand. Application of least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) and stochastic gradient boosting methodologies to the test market data along with other information about 508 products resulted in notable improvement in forecast accuracy over expert opinion. Specifically, the percentage of items that went unsold dropped by about 40% when using the predictive analytics tools in place of expert opinion. This striking result reflects, in part, the difficulty of using expert opinion to forecast sales of new, trendy merchandise in the absence of historical time-series sales information. By using the predictive analytics sales forecasts, the company now manufactures fewer products that never sell and, in general, manages its supply chain more effectively.

Suggested Citation

  • Marlene A. Smith & Murray J. Côté, 2022. "Predictive Analytics Improves Sales Forecasts for a Pop-up Retailer," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 52(4), pages 379-389, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:52:y:2022:i:4:p:379-389
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.2022.1119
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.2022.1119
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/inte.2022.1119?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Shuyun Ren & Hau-Ling Chan & Pratibha Ram, 2017. "A Comparative Study on Fashion Demand Forecasting Models with Multiple Sources of Uncertainty," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 257(1), pages 335-355, October.
    2. Fildes, Robert & Ma, Shaohui & Kolassa, Stephan, 2019. "Retail forecasting: research and practice," MPRA Paper 89356, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Felipe Caro & Jérémie Gallien & Miguel Díaz & Javier García & José Manuel Corredoira & Marcos Montes & José Antonio Ramos & Juan Correa, 2010. "Zara Uses Operations Research to Reengineer Its Global Distribution Process," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 40(1), pages 71-84, February.
    4. Ashish Sood & Gareth M. James & Gerard J. Tellis, 2009. "Functional Regression: A New Model for Predicting Market Penetration of New Products," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 28(1), pages 36-51, 01-02.
    5. Marshall Fisher & Kumar Rajaram, 2000. "Accurate Retail Testing of Fashion Merchandise: Methodology and Application," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 19(3), pages 266-278, June.
    6. Friedman, Jerome H., 2002. "Stochastic gradient boosting," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 367-378, February.
    7. Rudkowski, Janice & Heney, Chelsea & Yu, Hong & Sedlezky, Sean & Gunn, Frances, 2020. "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Mapping and modeling the pop-up retail customer journey," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Swaminathan, Kritika & Venkitasubramony, Rakesh, 2024. "Demand forecasting for fashion products: A systematic review," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 247-267.
    2. Spiliotis, Evangelos & Makridakis, Spyros & Kaltsounis, Anastasios & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2021. "Product sales probabilistic forecasting: An empirical evaluation using the M5 competition data," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 240(C).
    3. Gür Ali, Özden & Gürlek, Ragıp, 2020. "Automatic Interpretable Retail forecasting with promotional scenarios," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 1389-1406.
    4. Mansoor, Umer & Jamal, Arshad & Su, Junbiao & Sze, N.N. & Chen, Anthony, 2023. "Investigating the risk factors of motorcycle crash injury severity in Pakistan: Insights and policy recommendations," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 139(C), pages 21-38.
    5. Bissan Ghaddar & Ignacio Gómez-Casares & Julio González-Díaz & Brais González-Rodríguez & Beatriz Pateiro-López & Sofía Rodríguez-Ballesteros, 2023. "Learning for Spatial Branching: An Algorithm Selection Approach," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 35(5), pages 1024-1043, September.
    6. Akash Malhotra, 2018. "A hybrid econometric-machine learning approach for relative importance analysis: Prioritizing food policy," Papers 1806.04517, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2020.
    7. Li, Han & Hyndman, Rob J., 2021. "Assessing mortality inequality in the U.S.: What can be said about the future?," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C), pages 152-162.
    8. Nahushananda Chakravarthy H G & Karthik M Seenappa & Sujay Raghavendra Naganna & Dayananda Pruthviraja, 2023. "Machine Learning Models for the Prediction of the Compressive Strength of Self-Compacting Concrete Incorporating Incinerated Bio-Medical Waste Ash," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(18), pages 1-22, September.
    9. Tim Voigt & Martin Kohlhase & Oliver Nelles, 2021. "Incremental DoE and Modeling Methodology with Gaussian Process Regression: An Industrially Applicable Approach to Incorporate Expert Knowledge," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(19), pages 1-26, October.
    10. Kourentzes, Nikolaos & Athanasopoulos, George, 2021. "Elucidate structure in intermittent demand series," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 288(1), pages 141-152.
    11. Wen, Shaoting & Buyukada, Musa & Evrendilek, Fatih & Liu, Jingyong, 2020. "Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses of co-combustion/pyrolysis of textile dyeing sludge and incense sticks: Regression and machine-learning models," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 463-474.
    12. Zhu, Haibin & Bai, Lu & He, Lidan & Liu, Zhi, 2023. "Forecasting realized volatility with machine learning: Panel data perspective," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 251-271.
    13. Zhang, Ning & Li, Zhiying & Zou, Xun & Quiring, Steven M., 2019. "Comparison of three short-term load forecast models in Southern California," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 189(C).
    14. Smyl, Slawek & Hua, N. Grace, 2019. "Machine learning methods for GEFCom2017 probabilistic load forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1424-1431.
    15. Peres, Renana & Muller, Eitan & Mahajan, Vijay, 2010. "Innovation diffusion and new product growth models: A critical review and research directions," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 91-106.
    16. Barzin,Samira & Avner,Paolo & Maruyama Rentschler,Jun Erik & O’Clery,Neave, 2022. "Where Are All the Jobs ? A Machine Learning Approach for High Resolution Urban Employment Prediction inDeveloping Countries," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9979, The World Bank.
    17. Wesley Marcos Almeida & Claudimar Pereira Veiga, 2023. "Does demand forecasting matter to retailing?," Journal of Marketing Analytics, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(2), pages 219-232, June.
    18. Eike Emrich & Christian Pierdzioch, 2016. "Volunteering, Match Quality, and Internet Use," Schmollers Jahrbuch : Journal of Applied Social Science Studies / Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, vol. 136(2), pages 199-226.
    19. Kusiak, Andrew & Zheng, Haiyang & Song, Zhe, 2009. "On-line monitoring of power curves," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 34(6), pages 1487-1493.
    20. Zhu, Siying & Zhu, Feng, 2019. "Cycling comfort evaluation with instrumented probe bicycle," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 217-231.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:52:y:2022:i:4:p:379-389. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.