Meeting Your Growth Goals with Sales Forecasting on Shopify
Accurately forecasting sales is crucial for achieving your business goals and managing inventory needs. Setting unrealistic targets can be demotivating, while setting achievable goals can boost team morale.
This guide will discuss how By the Numbers leverages machine learning to forecast Shopify sales and how you can use this data to optimize your business performance.
What is Forecasting?
Our forecasting method employs machine learning to accurately predict time series data by using an additive model that considers non-linear trends, yearly, weekly, and daily seasonality, and holiday effects.
This approach allows us to accurately predict sales even if there are significant seasonal variations, with just a few seasons of historical data. Our model can handle missing data, shifts in trends, and outliers with ease, ensuring reliable and robust forecasts.
Where to View Your Sales Forecast
You can access your sales forecast in two locations: the Insights page and the Goals page. Both can be accessed by selecting them from the left navigation menu.
At the top left of the Insights page, you will see the forecasted amount for the current period:
The value displayed represents the total sales forecast for the given period, which includes both realized and unrealized sales. The solid blue line on the graph represents the realized sales for the period, while the dotted blue line shows the remaining forecasted sales for the period.
How to use Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting can be best utilized through the Goals feature in By the Numbers. With this feature, you can establish a metric to monitor over a specific timeframe, like monthly sales. For detailed instructions on setting up and tracking your goals, refer to our Goals documentation.