Multichannel Merchant

Walking the forecast tightrope

Ed Foy, CEO of eFashion Solutions, an e-commerce operations management firm that oversees online sales for brands that include Apple Bottoms, Members Only, and Baby Phat, remembers a similar instance from the 2004 holiday season. All of a sudden order numbers for a particular item shot through the roof. "We have an intelligent system that notifies us, 'Something crazy's going on here. You're selling through at 15% of inventory, and you've only had it in the warehouse for seven days.' Hello, there's an alert. We look at the Website; traffic is converting like crazy. What's going on? Then we find out that Apple Bottoms is on Oprah Winfrey's Christmas list." There was no way to meet the demand, and worse, the return rate for that item shot up because the prepack assortment hadn't included enough larger sizes.