Reorder What Actually Sells. Stop Funding the Slow Movers.
Trade counter retail has a unique demand pattern: a small set of bestsellers covers 70% of revenue, a wide long tail covers the rest, and seasonal peaks (project season, year-end, weather-driven) hammer the bestsellers. Spreadsheets and static min/max levels can't keep up. We build forecasting tuned to your real sales velocity — across counter, trade accounts, and online.
The promise
Where it hurts
The trade counters & industrial supply reality.
You've got 4,000 SKUs across the trade counter, web shop, and account customers. Your buyer is working from a spreadsheet that hasn't been recalibrated in two years. Some SKUs get attention; most get reordered to the same level they always have been. Cash is tied up in slow movers; bestsellers stock out in peak weeks.
What we actually build
Tuned for trade counters & industrial supply.
Multi-channel sales aggregation
Trade counter EPOS sales + web shop orders + trade account orders, deduplicated and aggregated per SKU. Real sales velocity across every channel.
Seasonality and trend modelling
Per-SKU seasonal patterns (project season peaks, weather-driven, year-end), trend direction (growing, declining, stable), weekly patterns (which days are busy on counter vs. web).
Supplier-aware reordering
Lead times per supplier, MOQs, price-break optimisation, container-fill awareness for imported lines. Recommendations respect your real cash-flow rules.
Buyer-in-the-loop recommendations
Weekly reorder list, ranked by criticality. Your buyer reviews, approves, or overrides. The system learns from overrides — which slow movers you keep in stock for one customer, which suppliers are unreliable.
Real engagement
The outcome.
Sales velocity model across the SKU base. Buyer time on reorder planning reduced significantly while stock-out rate on bestsellers dropped. Multi-channel demand (trade counter + web + account) unified into one view.
Typical stack
We integrate with what you have.
- Custom EPOS / trade counter systems
- Shopify / WooCommerce
- Sage / Xero
- Account customer order portals
- Supplier order systems
If your stack isn't listed, ask — almost always we can integrate. We've connected to bespoke MES, ancient on-prem systems, and email-only interfaces.
Pricing
Fixed fee, phased delivery.
£4,800–£14,000 for build, ~£300–£700/month depending on data volume
From £4,800
Stock forecasting for trade counters & industrial supply
- Workflow audit + industry-specific spec
- Build, integrations, and tuning to your real data
- Live deployment in your environment
- Ongoing tuning + accuracy monitoring
Questions
Things people in this industry ask us.
01 How is this different from min/max in our ERP?
Min/max is static. Real demand isn't. AI forecasting reads the last 12-24 months of velocity, seasonal patterns, trend direction, and lead times — and recommends dynamic reorder quantities that update as data updates. Min/max says "always 30." Forecasting says "next week 47, the week after 22, here's the pattern."
02 What about big trade-account customer orders?
Large account orders are detected and handled separately — they don't distort the everyday velocity model. If a big customer reliably orders 200 units every March, that's factored in as a known event, not noise.
03 Does it integrate with our supplier ordering?
Yes — recommendations can be one-click POs, or auto-generated drafts for buyer review. Multi-supplier order optimisation included (group orders to hit MOQs, batch for container fill).
04 How long until results?
Recommendations live in 6-8 weeks. Working capital and stock-out improvements typically show up over 3-6 months as old slow stock works through and new patterns take effect.
05 What if our sales history is messy?
Most are. Returns, refunds, promotional bumps, one-off bulk orders. We handle the cleanup as part of build — anomaly detection, outlier removal, holiday adjustments. You don't need perfect data.
The pattern
See stock forecasting for other industries.
Stock forecasting
You've got cash tied up in stock that hasn't moved in nine months — and you're stocking out on the items your best customers actually buy.
Tell us what needs sorting.
Send the rough outline. Chris or Kay will come back with the sensible next step, whether that is a fixed quote, a quick call, or a straight answer that it is not worth doing yet.