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How to: Deal with Black Friday /Cyber Monday

Understanding Post-Black Friday Forecasting & Trends

Carla Domingos avatar
Written by Carla Domingos
Updated yesterday

Understanding Post-Black Friday Forecasting & Trends

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are often the busiest days of the year. However, once the sales event is over, demand naturally drops.

At Optiply, we call this the "High Season Hangover."

If a forecasting system isn't smart enough, it might look at your Black Friday sales spike and assume that is your new normal (a phenomenon called "recency bias"). This would lead to recommendations to massively overstock for December and January.

Rest assured, Optiply is aware of this drop. Our system is designed to differentiate between a temporary sales spike and actual business growth.
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How We Prevent Overstocking (The Logic)

To ensure your purchasing advice remains accurate after the holidays, Optiply applies a specific logic to your forecast during the BFCM period.

1. Trend Calculation (Avoiding Recency Bias)

When calculating your general growth trend, our system actively excludes the demand data from the Black Friday period.

Specifically, for the calculation of the trend, we do not take into account demand from:

  • 2 weeks before Black Friday, until

  • 2.5 weeks after Black Friday.

By "smoothing" out this period, the system understands that the sudden spike in sales is an event, not a permanent upward trend. This prevents the system from suggesting you buy stock as if every day were Black Friday.

2. Seasonal Adjustment (Keeping History Intact)

While we exclude this data for trend calculation, we do use it for seasonal adjustments.

This means Optiply looks at your historical data (last year's Black Friday) to understand that this time of year is naturally busy. We use this to ensure you have enough stock to cover the event itself, without letting the event skew your long-term forecast.


Summary

You do not need to manually adjust your settings or worry about the system misinterpreting your sales data.

  • We ignore the spike when calculating your long-term growth trend (so you don't overstock in January).

  • We respect the spike when calculating seasonality (so you are prepared for the holiday rush next year).


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