Sales Forecasting
Majako Sales Forecasting is a plugin for nopCommerce that predicts sales using machine learning.
Getting started
After installing the plugin you will need an API key. This can be purchased at majako.net/sales-forecast-api. Upon completeing your order you will receive an email with your key. You can also find the API key under your order history.
Configuration
The plugin settings can be changed on the plugin's configuration page (found under Configuration/Local plugins or [your store url]/Admin/SalesForecasting/Configure), where you can also input your API key.
Quantile
The only other setting is Quantile, which allows you to request a quantile of the probability distribution of each prediction. This setting is given in percent, and thus accepts an integer between 0 and 99. If set to 0, no quantile is computed (this is slightly faster), and the same number as the hard prediction will be displayed.
Making forecasts
The forecasting page can be found under Sales/Sales forecasting in the admin view. A regular product search panel is displayed together with an input field for Period length, which specifies the number of days to forecast for. Submit your search to continue, or optionally save the search results as a CSV file for inspection. This file contains the order history for your search in the format accepted by the API.
On the next page, you can choose which discounts, if any, to apply to the next period. The system will only display discounts that are active during the period for products included in the search. Note, however, that nopCommerce takes very long calculating final discounts for many products, so if the forecast is for a large number of products, you may want to enter a manual blanket discount for all products at once.
That's all! Submit the forecast, go grab a cup of coffee, and come back to view the results. Return to the main forecasting page: if the forecast is ready, the results will be displayed in a table. Otherwise, wait a minute and refresh the page. The results can be saved in CSV format for reference and viewing in a spreadsheet editor, but the forecast will be available on this page for 30 days or until you make a new forecast.
