🆕 How To: Deal with New Products
An essential part of your business growth is continually introducing new products into your range. However, this always involves a unique inventory challenge: because there is no historical sales data available for these items, a purely data-driven algorithm cannot accurately predict future demand.
Until the system gathers enough data to generate reliable forecasts, you will have to rely on your own market knowledge and manually adjust the purchase advice. Here is how Optiply handles new products and how you should strategise your first orders.
🛑 1. How Optiply Defines a "New" Product
Optiply needs a baseline of data to start doing its mathematical heavy lifting.
The Rule: As long as a product has less than five days of registered sales, Optiply categorises it as a new product (or an "immature" product, in the case that it has not been sold yet but lacks a specific "NEW" tag in your webshop).
System Behaviour: Because the system wants to protect you from buying dead stock, the maximum advised stock for a new product is always exactly 1.
Visual Indicator: To remind you that human intervention is needed, a new product will always be flagged with a New tag (and usually a red dot) in your purchase advice. The tag will remain for a complete cycle.
⚖️ 2. The First Purchase Challenge: Supply Chain Length
When making your first purchase decision for a new product, it is essential to look critically at how much you are ordering. If you order too little, you miss out on early sales. If you order too much, you risk creating dead stock if the launch flops.
This decision should heavily depend on the length of your supply chain (Order Period + Delivery Time). Consider these two strategic extremes:
Scenario A: The Short Supply Chain
Example: You order from this supplier daily, and their delivery time is only two days.
The Strategy: In this case, following Optiply's default advice of 1 piece is probably perfect. If the product sells immediately on launch day, the system will automatically order another one the very next day. Because the supply chain is so fast, you will quickly accumulate the five sales needed for the algorithm to take over without risking much capital upfront.
Scenario B: The Long Supply Chain
Example: You only order from this overseas supplier once every six weeks, and the delivery time takes three weeks.
The Strategy: This is a much more difficult decision. If you only buy 1 piece and it sells the day after delivery, you will be out of stock and have to wait a gruelling nine weeks before new stock arrives! To avoid this massive gap in availability, you must order a larger quantity at the first purchase decision based on your own market intuition.
Pro Tip: If you have a long supply chain, try to order at least five pieces for your first purchase order if your budget allows. This ensures you survive the lead time and guarantees you hit the required sales threshold to generate automated advice for the next order cycle.
❓ 3. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Why doesn't Optiply just guess how much I will sell?
Optiply is built to protect your cash flow. "Guessing" leads to overstocking. We prefer to default to the safest possible mathematical recommendation (1 unit) and flag the item so you can apply your human expertise and business strategy to the launch.
When exactly will Optiply start forecasting my new product?
Once a product successfully logs its 5th day of sales, the system crosses the data threshold. The "New" tag will drop, and the algorithm will begin calculating standard, automated purchase advice based on that fresh sales trend.
What is the difference between a "New" product and an "Immature" product?
They are treated exactly the same mathematically by the algorithm (advised stock of 1). A product is simply considered "immature" if it has fewer than 5 sales, but your specific e-commerce integration did not push a literal "New" tag to Optiply when the item was created.