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Benefits of Demand Forecasting in C-store

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petrosoft inc.
Benefits of Demand Forecasting in C-store

Does your convenience store seem to be constantly out-of-stock? or Does your convenience store have a lot of items that have not been sold or cannot be sold due to spoilage?

These issues are a common problem for many c-stores and other small retail businesses. It is equally important for you to know how much inventory you need and when you need it so your convenience store never runs out of products needed by customers or those with high-profit margins. 

What is Demand Forecasting?

Demand forecasting is the preliminary inventory planning for a future period. It is a process to analyze and estimate the stock requirements to meet future customer demands. The process involves internal factors like historical business data and customer buying patterns as well as external factors like seasonality and market trends to analyze and predict future demands with higher accuracy.

Demand forecasting allows you to maintain your c-store inventory level with the right quantity of product items in order to avoid understocking or overstocking of inventory and increase c-store profit margins. An accurate demand forecast can help your c-store business make the right purchase decision which helps to avoid understocking and overstocking of convenience store inventory, ultimately helping you to avoid spoilage or out-of-stock situations.

What Are the Benefits of Demand Forecasting in C-store?

Better Inventory Management

Demand forecasting helps you to identify inventory needs, sizes, and timing of purchase orders with greater accuracy. Accurate demand forecasting improves your convenience store inventory management strategy by ensuring that the items on your convenience store shelves are always in sufficient quantity. 

Reduce Out-of-Stock Situations

An out-of-stock situation can have a negative impact on your convenience store business because it can severely hurt your profit margins and customer loyalty. Planning your c-store inventory based on anticipated increases in volume shopping, retention of supplies, and storage allows you and other retailers to maintain ample inventory and reducing the chance of having out of stock situations. 

Prevents Inventory Spoilage

Convenience stores deal with a lot of perishable items that are most likely to spoil, decay, or become unsafe to consume after a short period of time. With an accurate forecast, you can avoid overstocking your c-store inventory, perishables items in particular, and potentially reducing food waste and spoilage while maximizing profit. The more precise the forecast, the lower the risk of overstocking, and higher the profit margins. 

Reduce Uncertainty

Demand forecasts reduce business risk by predicting the inventory-related uncertainties that may arise in the future. C-store business environment is one of the most dynamic in nature due to the constant change in season, buying behavior, competition, product supply, market conditions, etc. Demand forecasts help you to make the right business decisions about the right choice of product, quantity, and volume, and other factors that can affect your store business. 

Increases Profit Margins

Convenience stores have a very small amount of profit margin because most of the items are significantly low-priced items, for example, groceries and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) products that are sold quickly and at a relatively low cost. By having the right products in place, you can increase your stock margins by reducing losses that would have been rendered due to out-of-stock or outdated product items in your convenience store.

 

You can increase your convenience store profits margins by identifying your top-performing products in terms of anticipated sales volume as well as significant profit margins. 

Improves Capacity Utilization 

Demand forecasting can help you to utilize your storage space more efficiently by determining the potentially accurate capacity needed by convenience stores to meet the changing product demands. For example, excess stocks can take a lot of space that could possibly be used to display other items. By determining the right amount of product quantity can ultimately help in utilizing the right amount of storage capacity.

Better Business Decisions

The most important business decision in a c-store business is purchase orders. This is where you have to be extra careful because wrong purchasing decisions can cost you money. Over-purchasing of inventory means huge losses because your store items will become obsolete or spoiled after a certain amount of time. Whereas, under-purchasing means unhappy customers that are most likely not returning to your store any time soon.

 

Forecasting also helps to plan promotional activities like discounts and promotions. For example, if you know there will be increased demand from customers because of promotional events like Black Friday then you may want to order more than usual 

Improves Budgeting

Demand forecasting can also help you convenience tore business to determine financial budgets. Forecasting allows you to estimate and resource certain resources that are required to stay ahead of supply and demand. It gives c-store owners better information to effectively plan the funds for the upcoming year. This is especially critical for products that are in high demand for specific situations.

Improved customer service

Ultimately, one of the main benefits of demand forecasting is to improve customer service. Study shows that 40% of customers are unlikely to return to a c-store where they faced an out-of-stock product or couldn’t find the desired product. When customers often find themself in out-of-stock situations, they tend to find a much reliable alternative store. This greatly impacts your customer loyalty.

When you better forecast the sales based on seasonal or elevated consumer demand, your c-store business can benefit in multiple ways. you can rely upon having goods customers need when supply elsewhere is low.

Choosing a Demand Forecasting Software

Choosing demand forecasting software is the ultimate solution to avoid such situations for your convenience store.

A Demand forecasting system must be powerful enough to process data at a retail scale. In order to conduct an accurate demand forecast, it is important to feed your demand planning system with enough relevant data. A convenience store software generates enormous amounts of sales data every single day that is just enough to estimate the future demand. Therefore, it is more convenient if a demand forecasting solution is already integrated with your c-store back-office software and inventory management software.

 

CStoreOffice® is a cloud-based back-office system designed to increase operational efficiencies and speed data entry, reconciliation, and forecasting to optimize merchandise, food, and fuel sales, as well as margins, inventory turns, shrink, and spoilage. CStoreOffice® comes with an integrated demand forecasting feature that saves a huge amount of time in collecting sales data, feeding the data into the system, and more importantly, save money in purchasing a forecasting system. 


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