App of the Week: Weather Sales Impact
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Tomas Kauer - Moderator 
For retailers, nothing is more frustrating than when an unforeseen weather event ruins their carefully planned staffing and inventory strategies.
If you work in retail management, you’ve almost certainly encountered this scenario before. Perhaps a rainstorm discouraged customers from participating in the big weekend sale you’d been planning for months. Or maybe an unseasonable bout of great weather left you unable to meet demand for sunglasses, sunscreen, or wide brimmed hats. In both cases, you’d have been a lot better off if you’d known ahead of time how the weather was going to affect your bottom line.
That’s why there’s the Weather Sales Impact Dashboard App for the Domo business cloud. By
combining weather reports with your historical sales data and a high-end predictive algorithm, this app provides in-depth insight into how weather influences your sales results. With this knowledge in hand, retailers can make a number of strategic shifts that allow them to optimize their results by anticipating upcoming weather patterns.
Weather Sales Impact tells retailers how different kinds of weather influence their sales performance.
Weather Sales Impact is an interactive, data-visualization app that helps retailers understand how different weather forecasts can be expected to affect their sales. By fusing historical and upcoming weather forecasts with your past sales history, the app is able to identify trends based on temperature, types of weather, frequency of weather types, and precipitation patterns. As an added bonus, the Weather Sales Impact Dashboard can even tell you which types of products sell best during different kinds of weather.
By taking into account how the climate affects sales performance, Weather Sales Impact provides a more accurate sales forecast for every one of your retail locations. Rather than merely hoping that the weather won’t prevent them from reaching their quarterly targets, retail managers and executives can sleep soundly knowing what to expect.
Use predictive forecasting to plan flash sales, acquire the right inventory, and manage your personnel with unprecedented precision.
What all this means is that instead of reacting to weather events after they happen, retailers can be proactive in making changes that will allow them to increase their profits.
For example, if you know that your best sales days come when it’s partly cloudy and above 70 degrees, you can plan ahead by staffing more employees and ordering additional inventory for those days. If you’re planning a big event or a new store opening, Weather Sales Impact is the perfect app for choosing which day to hold it.
Meanwhile, a slow, rainy day might inspire you to try driving additional purchases with a flash sale or to cut your losses by telling excess employees to stay home. Or, you can assess how many extra umbrellas and rain boots you sell when it pours, allowing you to make the best of a rain day by stocking up with just the right amount of inventory.
Indeed, no matter what the five-day forecast holds in store, the Weather Sales Impact app gives you all the tools you need to maximize your profits.
Want to learn more about how Domo apps can help you make better decisions?
If you’re already a Domo customer, you can browse our ever-growing library of apps—or start building your own app today.
