Questions

I have an etsy and amazon shop and I'm grabbing the data from ship station a week at a time and am realizing that it would take a ton of time to create a weekly breakdown and forcast by manually maping the data out on an excell sheet, but it would be really helpful to have these projections in order to plan our buying and manufactoring, and it would also be fun to project how much cash we may make this year by calculating the difference in our growth.

I'm a data scientist and look into questions like this frequently. Until recently, I ran the data science organization at a payment processor, where we answered questions like this for merchants on a daily basis, and also built products at scale to help inform merchants' decision making.

The question here really is: can you predict these sales numbers well enough to inform specific buying and manufacturing decisions? Sales numbers are difficult to predict precisely for many reasons (week to week fluctuations can be pretty high, seasonality can be a big factor depending on what you're selling, it's very helpful but often difficult to separate sales from existing and new customers, etc.), but as long as you can predict them well enough and far enough in advance to make better decisions you can create a positive financial impact. The point is that this isn't so much a question about predicting the sales as well as you can, but a question about optimizing your decision making process.

Therefore, I'd encourage you to engage the help of someone who has experience in solving operational business problems using data. One of the first things a good data person should do is help you quantify the size of the problem - how much money you can save by doing this analysis. This will help you determine how much time and money to put into it to make sure that the project has a positive return on investment.


Answered 9 years ago

Unlock Startups Unlimited

Access 20,000+ Startup Experts, 650+ masterclass videos, 1,000+ in-depth guides, and all the software tools you need to launch and grow quickly.

Already a member? Sign in

Copyright © 2024 Startups.com LLC. All rights reserved.