Updated September 20, 2023

Sales Forecast Dashboard gives D2C brand the possibility to estimate future sales. The typical pitfall for a D2C brand has for long been the possibility to only look at the past instead of the future.

Ellis forecast model bases on of the most accurate methods for forecasting, Prophet algorithm. Prophet is developed by Facebook used for forecasting sales and events over time. It is based on a decomposable additive Machine Learning model where non-linear trends fit with seasonality, it also takes into account the effects of holidays and seasonal events like Black Fridays.

How does sales forecast works?

Sales forecast  using all of your sales on Shopify platform as a historical data mass. Based on this Ellis calculates there sales scenarios for upcoming days. The credibility of the forecast keeps improving over time and the more you have data, the better your forecasts will be.

Sales forecasts work the best in steady business environments. As example suddenly ending stock, flash sales or technical issues in the store can cause issues for the scenarios.

What do the sales scenarios mean?

Sales scenarios are built so that you can compare easily accumulated sales to three different scenarios. The concept of three different sales scenarios has become a classic since early forecasting has been possible in retail since 1980's

• Dark Green is a predicted estimation, meaning the sales would follow close to the existing past weeks sales trend.
• Light Grey is a predicted lower bound scenario, meaning that the sales would not continue quite as good as they have been lately.
• Black is the predicted upper bound scenario, it's not likely that sales will get this high on daily basis, but this helps to estimate the maximum daily sales during a campaign or influencer sales frenzy.

Sales Forecast Dashboard Elements

Sales Forecast graph shows the forecasted sales (predicted revenue) for the next 90 days:

• The dark green line represents the predicted revenue, while the upper and lower bounds (shown in dark grey and light grey correspondingly) indicate the range of possible revenue outcomes. 
• The light green line represents the actual revenue achieved during the selected period of time. 
• The closer the light green line is to the dark green line, the more accurate the forecast was.

Actual Sales & Predictions: 7d/14d/30d/90d 

• The table shows a comprehensive overview of sales performance covering the past 7, 14, 30, and 90 days. 
• In addition, it provides valuable insights into future sales trends by displaying worst-case, predicted, and best-case sales forecasts for the next 7, 14, 30, and 90 days.