The very transatlantic shipping delays during this pandemic have forced us to often place a new order before the last one has arrived. It also means that more products are out of stock for a longer time until a shipment arrive.
So over the last few days we have improved our internal tools to better cope with both these situations.
Bugs
We are currently experiencing a known issue between the DHL module and the Amazon integration. This means that we have to create the postage for all Amazon orders manually.
Statistics
Statistics is everything.
It determines what we buy and thus how many new products and new product variations we can affort. It also means what products are popular enough to get an additional size or coloring.
Our sales statistics have already handled times when a product was not in stock for the sake of predicting the near future. However it only looked at a given strech of time. We have now improved it to look further into the past if a product was out of stock a lot.
Result:
This means we can spend our money more wisely and not order more stock then we need.
Overlaping orders
We have also added code to better track what orders manufacturers are currently working on, are currently in transit and how lead times are affected by the current pandemic.
Our tools now tell us not only how much of each product we have and we should have to cover the near future but also how many are already ordered and how long „the near future“ must actually be.
Result:
We can allow for customer toys more frequently. Even though we can’t make them arrive any faster, we can ask for customer variations to be ordered along more frequently and with less of a short time window.