5 Surprising Ways Predictive Analytics Helps Retailers

By Adrian Silipo, Marketing Manager at Retalon

Modern retailers understand the core benefits of leveraging the power of Predictive Analytics and Artificial Intelligence. Predictive Analytics accounts for all of your company’s relevant data at a micro-level, identifies your business’ trends, opportunities, and influencing factors. It makes recommendations to retailers that will help them increase forecast accuracy, reduce inventory costs, increase in sales, and maintain high customer satisfaction levels.

This software is becoming more intelligent, more critical to retail success, and more common in the retail space, yet there are still many important things that Predictive Analytics can do that surprises retailers. Here are five of them:

Superior Demand Forecast That Accounts for Dozens of Influencing Factors

Demand affect every element of a retail business, from planning and open to buys, to inventory assortment, distribution, pricing, and promotions. Anticipating demand is critical. Retailers live and die by their forecasts, and an accurate forecast enables you to be proactive, improves ROI, and gives you more consistency in your business.

Traditionally, merchants relied solely on past history, human input, and guesswork. This resulted in low forecast accuracy and high labor cost because so many things change from year to year. Heavily relying on past sales leads to repeating the previous year’s mistakes and missed opportunities.