METRAI ← Back to Supply Chain Diagnostic Schedule a Conversation

Interactive guide · Store replenishment

Why the shelf runs out on promotion weekends

Your product sells through the retailer's ordering system, which decides what arrives before the weekend. Describe an item in three clicks, then see how three ways of ordering handle the same shoppers.

I am a

1. Describe the item

A fast-selling item with a big weekend, where most promotion outages happen. Pick the promotion and the delivery days.

What promotion runs in week 3?

Which days are deliveries?

Units shoppers want Promotion week Delivery day

Four weeks of daily demand built from your answers. Saturday is the busiest day of every week.Multi-buyMulti-buys lift the weekend most, because shoppers stock up.

2. Store replenishment orders: three approaches

Same shoppers, same deliveries.

Units sold Wanted but missed (shelf empty) Promotion week

Moving average (last 3 months)

Legacy

The approach many older systems still use. Orders from the average of the last 13 weeks of sales, with no promotion plan, so the promotion week gets a normal-size order.

Shelf fill, promotion week—
Sales missed, promotion week—

—

Strength
Very stable. One-off spikes barely move it.
Weakness
Misses promotions completely and is slow to follow any real change in sales.
Limitation
Gives a sale from three months ago the same weight as yesterday's.

Weekly forecast with promotion lift

Plans each weekday from the last four weeks of sales, so Saturday gets more than Tuesday. For a promotion it adds one planned lift, the same for a TPR, a feature ad or a multi-buy. This is how most systems are set up.

Shelf fill, promotion week—
Sales missed, promotion week—

—

Strength
Plans the shape of the week, so a normal weekend is covered.
Weakness
Uses the same lift for every offer at that price, so offers that lift the weekend more come up short.
Limitation
Learns from what sold. A promotion that ran out teaches it a lower lift next time.

Weekly forecast with planned pre-build

The same weekly forecast, but the promotion lift is planned by offer type and by day, and the last delivery before the weekend is pre-built to carry Saturday and Sunday.

Shelf fill, promotion week—
Sales missed, promotion week—

—

Strength
Sizes each delivery for the days it has to cover, weekend and offer type included.
Weakness
Needs the promotion calendar with the offer type. If the promotion sells less than planned, the pre-build is left on the shelf.
Limitation
Only as good as the planned lift. A promotion that beats plan still runs short.

METRAI diagnostic

3. How METRAI attributes the miss

The diagnosis for the weekly forecast with promotion lift, the way most systems are set up. We split the promotion-week miss into what the forecast got wrong and what the empty shelf lost, check the supply side, follow the lost units to their cause, then replay the week to prove it.

Step 1. Split the miss

What shoppers wanted on the empty days is estimated from the item's sales rate before the shelf ran out and from comparable promotions. In client data we show this estimate as a range.

Step 2. Check supply, then follow the lost units

  1. Yes
    Was the shelf actually empty? —Data: store on-hand inventory
  2. Yes
    Did deliveries arrive on time and in full? —Data: store receipts against store orders
  3. No
    Was the order big enough for the weekend? —Data: store orders, store POS
  4. Gap
    Why was it too small? —Data: promotion calendar with offer type, sales from past promotions

Step 3. Replay the week with the lift planned by offer type

Sales missed, promotion week: as it happened → lift by offer type with pre-build—
Extra units on hand going into the next week—

Same shoppers, same deliveries, same four weeks of sales. Only the promotion plan changes, so the difference belongs to the plan.

Attribution

—

—

Which symptom are you seeing?

Each problem leaves its own fingerprint in data you already have. This guide covers the first one.

If you see thisLikely causeHow it is checked
Outages on weekends, worst in promotion weeks This guideThe weekend is not planned and the promotion lift is spread evenlyWeekend sell-through: Saturday and Sunday sales against stock at Friday close
The system shows stock, but the item stopped sellingThe stock record is wrong (phantom inventory)Runs of zero sales on items that normally sell every day
Stock climbing while sales fallThe forecast is too slow to follow a trendForecast against sales, week after week
Outages across many stores in the same weekThe DC runs short: stores ordering in sync, or the supplier lateStore orders against sales, and receipt dates against the committed lead time

Free health check

See this on your own stores

We run the weekend sell-through test on your retailer data and show the stores, items and weekends where the shelf ran out, what it cost, and what to ask the retailer for.

Schedule a Conversation

What it takes

  • Store-level POS
  • Store on-hand inventory
  • Promotion calendar