🚀 The Promotions Page
Webshops frequently deploy marketing activities—like email campaigns, influencer partnerships, or massive website sales—to increase the sales of specific products. Naturally, these activities will cause a massive spike in your future demand!
A Promotion in Optiply is a defined period in time where you plan for an increase in the expected demand pattern for a subset of your products. Adding this information directly into Optiply ensures your purchase advice scales up before the sale starts, preventing costly stockouts.
⚠️ Feature Availability Notice: > The Promotions feature requires advanced forecasting capabilities and is unavailable in the Optiply Lite version
🏷️ 1. The Four Types of Promotions
Promotions allow you to manually inject additional information into Optiply's automated forecast. Depending on your marketing strategy, you can choose from four distinct types of promotions:
A. Relative Promotion (Percentage)
A relative promotion adds a specific percentage of uplift to the standard forecast.
Example: If your promotion has an uplift of 40%, and the standard forecasted demand for that period is 200 units, the purchasing advice will automatically adjust to expect a demand of 280 units.
B. Absolute Promotion (Exact Volume)
An absolute promotion increases the forecast by an exact number of units, regardless of the baseline percentage.
Example: If your promotion has an exact uplift of 50 units, and the forecasted demand for the period is 300 units, the purchasing advice will adjust to expect a demand of 350 units.
C. Close-out Promotion (Clearance)
The close-out uplift is a very specific type of promotion. It assumes you are running a massive clearance sale to strongly reduce your inventory, but you still want to keep the product in stock in very small amounts after the sale ends.
How it works: A close-out promotion forces the purchase advice to temporarily ignore the standard forecasted demand so it doesn't accidentally reorder a massive batch of stock to replace what you just cleared out.
D. No Uplift (Temporary/Seasonal)
This type implies that the sales generated during the promo period will have no impact on your future forecast calculations.
How it works: It is perfect for highly seasonal or temporary articles (like holiday-specific items). The algorithm registers the sales spike but completely ignores it for future purchasing advice, preventing you from accidentally overstocking after the season ends.
⚙️ 2. How to Set Up a Promotion
Setting up a promotion is a quick, two-step process: creating the event and adding the products.
Step 1: Create the Promotion
Navigate to the Promotions page from your main menu.
Click the Create promotion button and define the dates and overall rules for the event.
Step 2: Add Your Products
Navigate to your Products page.
Check the boxes next to the specific products you want to include in the sale.
Click the "[x] item(s) selected" action menu at the top of the list.
Click Add to promotion and hit Save.
Note: If you are running a massive store-wide sale, you can also add products to a promotion in bulk via a CSV import! You can consult our Bulk Import guide for more details.
🎯 3. Adding Specific Product Uplifts
Sometimes, one "hero" product in your sale is going to perform much better than the rest. After adding products to a promotion, you can give individual items a specific uplift rule that will completely overwrite the overall promotion's baseline uplift!
To set a specific uplift:
Go to Promotions, select your active promotion, and click Edit.
Find the specific product on the list.
Fill in the custom Uplift value and select the Uplift Type (Relative or Absolute) for that specific item.
🧠 4. How Promotions Affect Historical Data
When forecasting future demand, Optiply's algorithm is smart enough to look back at your historical sales data and identify the dates of your past promotions. It automatically "smooths out" those massive sales spikes so your baseline forecasting isn't permanently skewed by a one-time marketing event.
When you add a new promotion, the system generates new stock-level calculations that update almost instantly. Once the product's new stock levels are processed, it immediately impacts your proposed buy orders!
❓ 5. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Should I use a Close-out promotion if I never want to sell the product again?
No. A Close-out promotion assumes you still want to keep a tiny, baseline amount of stock on the shelf after the clearance sale ends. If your goal is to completely empty the bin and never restock the item again, we suggest you use the Phase-out status on the Product Page instead.
How quickly does a promotion change my purchase advice?
The speed of the update depends on the volume of changes made (e.g., updating 10 products vs. 10,000 products). However, the system generally calculates these changes almost instantly. You will see the impact on your proposed buy orders right away!