- Lightspeed Commerce (TSX:LSPD) has launched new retail features in Lightspeed Insights, pushing new data-driven inventory planning and retail intelligence
- Among these innovations is seasonality forecasting, designed to help retailers drive more accurate order recommendations by considering seasonal events
- Based on a recent Lightspeed retailer sentiment survey, retailers have identified major challenges in inventory planning.
- Lightspeed stock (TSX:LSPD) last traded at C$11.47
Lightspeed Commerce (TSX:LSPD) has launched new retail features in Lightspeed Insights, pushing new data-driven inventory planning and retail intelligence. Among these innovations is seasonality forecasting, a tool that enables merchants to view order recommendations for seasonal products based on historical sales trends directly within their point-of-sale (POS) platform.
Key features
Seasonality forecasting is designed to help retailers drive more accurate order recommendations by considering seasonal events such as holidays, annual celebrations, temperature changes, and major sporting events. This feature has already translated into approximately C$13,000 higher gross profit for merchants using Lightspeed Insights, based on the typical value of inventory held by Lightspeed merchants.
Unlike other solutions that require third-party integrations or manual data analysis, Lightspeed’s seasonality forecasting is built directly into its POS platform.
Addressing retailer challenges
Based on a recent Lightspeed retailer sentiment survey, retailers have identified major challenges in inventory planning. Lightspeed’s seasonality forecasting and new data-driven tools can help address these issues:
- Inaccurate forecasting: Approximately 39 per cent of merchants want better insights into ordering quantities. Seasonality forecasting enhances forecasting accuracy for seasonal peaks by analyzing past sales trends instead of just recent data.
- Out of stock and overstocking: Merchants spend an average of 22 hours per week on inventory tasks and 20 hours on ordering and restocking. By automating replenishment recommendations, Lightspeed wants to help minimize stockouts and overstocking while optimizing cash flow. Merchants with Lightspeed Insights experience about 26 per cent fewer days out of stock for top-selling items, which can help boost sales by restocking high-demand products faster.
- Time-consuming manual reports: Around 50 per cent of merchants desire reduced manual effort for generating reports. Lightspeed Insights works to streamline operations with custom reporting, scheduled reports, and automated order recommendations.
Enhanced capabilities
In addition to seasonality forecasting, Lightspeed Insights now provides increased capabilities to help retailers better understand their operational challenges. The new sales visualizations feature enables merchants to dynamically view sales trends through interactive line graphs, simplifying complex data and allowing businesses to track and compare performance over time.
Lightspeed is also enhancing NuORDER’s order trends feature, giving retail buyers more visibility into top-performing products, categories, sizes, and colours.
Supporting retailers
These enhancements empower buyers with trend-based insights, ensuring they can stock the most in-demand products to drive sales and reduce waste. Now available to all Lightspeed Retail merchants across North America, Europe, and beyond, the new Lightspeed Insights features can help reduce human errors, foster better inventory planning, and increase overall profitability.
Methodology
- C$13,373 represents the estimated gross profit difference between customers actively using Lightspeed Insights to drive their replenishment ordering and those who have access but are not actively using Lightspeed Insights. This is calculated by multiplying the respective sample groups’ median GMROI by the median inventory value held by Lightspeed merchants in the three months ended December 31st, 2024 and then taking the difference. Results outside such samples could vary depending on locations and other factors. “GMROI” does not represent revenue or gross profit generated by Lightspeed.
- Survey data: Lightspeed initiated a consumer survey throughout July 2024 using third-party survey vendor Medallia. Over 2,000 responses were collected among North America, South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, the United Kingdom, and the Middle East. Respondents were required to be using point-of-sale software to sell retail goods.
- Stockout data: Top-selling items mean the top 5 per cent of SKUs (by way of revenue) over the analysis period (the three months ended December 31st, 2024). 26 per cent represents the difference in the proportion of days out of stock between customers with access to Lightspeed Insights and a cohort of similar-sized merchants who do not have access to Lightspeed Insights. Specifically, the median of the first sample group experienced stockouts 20 per cent of the time, whereas the median of the second sample group experienced stockouts 27 per cent of the time.
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“Retailers are consistently faced with annual ebbs and flows of demand based on seasonality and trends. Traditionally retailers rely on forecasting models that utilize recent sales data, or gut intuition, which can often lead to stockouts during peak periods or excessive overstock in slower seasons,” Dax Dasilva, Lightspeed’s Founder and CEO said in a news release. “Lightspeed’s new Seasonality Forecasting model changes the game by analyzing year-over-year trends to help predict demand more accurately. Merchants in key verticals like Sporting and Outdoor Goods and Home and Garden can now make smarter purchasing decisions, ensuring they have the right products at the right time.”
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Lightspeed Commerce offers a one-stop commerce platform designed to simplify, scale and enhance the customer experience. The company serves retail, hospitality and golf businesses in more than100 countries.
Lightspeed stock (TSX:LSPD) last traded at C$11.47.
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(Top image via Lightspeed Commerce Inc.)
