New product releases tackle critical retail challenges of inventory forecasting, reporting and understanding business performance
Lightspeed Commerce Inc., the one-stop commerce platform empowering merchants to provide the best omnichannel experiences, announced the launch of powerful new retail features in Lightspeed Insights, reinforcing its commitment to data-driven inventory planning and retail intelligence. Key amongst these innovations is Seasonality Forecasting, a helpful tool that enables merchants to view order recommendations for seasonal products based on historical sales trends—directly within their POS platform.
“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,” said Dax Dasilva, Founder and CEO of Lightspeed. “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 & Outdoor Goods and Home & Garden can now make smarter purchasing decisions, ensuring they have the right products at the right time.”
With the addition of Seasonality Forecasting, retailers will be able to drive even more accurate order recommendations that consider seasonal events like holidays, repetitive annual celebrations, seasonal temperature changes, major sporting events, etc. For merchants using Lightspeed Insights, this has already translated into ~$13,000 higher gross profit based on the typical value of inventory held by Lightspeed merchants1.
Unlike other solutions that require third-party integrations or manual data analysis, Lightspeed’s Seasonality Forecasting is built directly into its POS platform. By offering this level of embedded intelligence, Lightspeed continues to lead the way in retail innovation.
How Lightspeed’s Seasonality Forecasting Helps Retailers Stay Ahead
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: ~39% of merchants want better insights into ordering quantities2. Seasonality Forecasting enhances forecasting accuracy for seasonal peaks by analyzing past sales trends instead of just recent data.
- Out of stock & Overstocking: Merchants spend an average of 22 hours per week on inventory tasks and 20 hours on ordering and restocking2. By automating replenishment recommendations, Lightspeed helps minimize stockouts and overstocking while optimizing cash flow. Merchants with Lightspeed Insights experience ~26% fewer days out of stock for top-selling items3, which can help boost sales by restocking high-demand products faster.
- Time-Consuming Manual Reports: ~50% of merchants desire reduced manual effort for generating reports2. Lightspeed Insights streamlines operations with custom reporting, scheduled reports, and automated order recommendations.
In addition to Seasonality Forecasting, Lightspeed Insights now also provides increased capabilities to help retailers better understand their operational challenges. With the new Sales Visualizations, Lightspeed enables merchants to dynamically view sales trends through interactive line graphs. This feature simplifies complex data and allows businesses to track and compare performance over time, ensuring they can stay ahead of market shifts, and empowering decision-makers to act with greater confidence and precision.
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Chris Kelly, President of Go-To-Market (GTM) at Delinea
Lightspeed is also enhancing NuORDER’s Order Trends feature, giving retail buyers greater visibility into top-performing products, categories, sizes, and colors. Top 25 product trends and top categories in both size and colour sales are all trends which are available through NuORDER offerings. This is now available to United States based NuORDER customers.
These overall 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—empowering retailers to make data-driven decisions with confidence.