The Replenishment report offers recommendations for products that need to be purchased in order to meet demand. For each product, the report tells you the quantity to order and estimates the revenue lost if the product isn't purchased in time.

Before using the report, you must configure lead times and days of stock for your products.
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The lead time is the amount of time that elapses between placing a purchase order and receiving those products into your warehouse, where they can be bought by a customer. For example, if you place a purchase order on the first of the month and receive stock on the fourteenth, the lead time is 14 days.

The days of stock (or stock cover) indicates how long the amount of stock you have available should last in order to meet your fulfillment needs. For example, if you want to keep enough stock on hand to last one week, your days of stock is 7 days.

You can set these metrics for individual SKUs on the Replenishment screen by entering the desired figure into the relevant field. Add the columns to the report using the gear icon on the right-hand side of the page.

For more ways to set the lead time and days of stock, please read this article.

The replenishment recommendation for each variant is based on its forecast method and settings, forecast edits, and its replenishment planning settings (lead time and days of stock). Stock on order is also considered, along with the date that stock is expected to arrive.

Inventory Planner also computes a replenish date for each variant - the last date to purchase inventory without going out of stock and missing potential sales. An alert is triggered on the replenish date to notify you that you're at risk of losing sales if the variant isn't ordered that day. Learn more about setting up alerts here.

When you click on the Details icon for a particular product (indicated by an "i"), you'll see further information related to sales forecasting, including product sales by month, average sales, and forecasted stock information to used to generate the replenishment recommendation.

Note that the forecast and the number of units to reorder are separate figures.

The forecast indicates how many units will sell during the variant's days of stock period, while the replenishment recommendation indicates how many units to purchase to satisfy this demand.

The replenishment recommendation depends on the forecast, the current stock level, the number of units you'll sell during the lead time period, and the number of products on order.

Learn more about how the forecast and replenishment figures are calculated here.

In a variant's Forecast settings tab, found in the Details popup, you can customize the forecast method and settings used to generate replenishment recommendations. The forecast methods you can use are described below.

This method uses recent sales and stockouts during the sales period for forecast when generating a forecast. Inventory Planner calculates sales velocity and trend based on customer orders placed during this time frame.

You can set the sales period for forecast:

For example, sometimes you may want to take only the most recent months of sales into account, or some period in the past ignoring all other months.

Note that when you change the sales period, you won't see the new forecast right away, as it takes time to recompute. Click the "recompute" button and wait until the "recomputing replenishment" message disappears to see the new forecast.

The seasonal forecast method looks at the same months as the sales reference period, but in prior years. Seasonal forecasting is beneficial for holiday and seasonally driven items with 12+ months of history. Sales velocity is not a consideration, and trend is applied by evaluating sales over the last 12 months vs. the prior 12 months.

For example, sales from January 2018 and January 2019 impact the forecasted needs for January 2020. If today is December 31, 2019, the trend will be based on sales between January - December 2019 vs. January - December 2018.

Learn more about forecast methods and settings here.

Another important aspect for the forecasting is related to past stockouts. For example if you sold 10 units of product A last month, but the product was out of stock for half that time, the real demand for this product is 20 units per month. 

Inventory Planner tracks stock levels for each product from the moment it starts syncing, and so knows when the product was out of stock. You can also import a stock history to cover any time before using Inventory Planner. The stockout information will be taken into account by the forecasting algorithm, but if you allow overselling (e.g. back orders, preorders) then you should deactivate the "Use stockouts history" setting. That's especially true if you allow back orders - taking the above example, if back orders are allowed, the real product demand is still 10 even though the product was out of stock for half the month. 

Learn more about stockouts and how they affect the forecast here.

If you don’t want to include specific variants in the forecast, we recommended marking them non-replenishable.

If you want to view them or make them replenishable again, you can adjust the filter on the top of the page. 

Learn more about hiding dropshipped or discontinued items from the forecast here.

The forecast is based on your historical sales and is recomputed by Inventory Planner every day. However, sometimes it makes sense to manually override the automatic forecast to align it more closely with your plans - for example, when planning a marketing campaign. You can do so from the Edit forecast screen.

Learn more about the Edit forecast screen here.