It is a big help for me. I have approximately 2500 SKUs in store and it helps me to make sure I don't forget an important item, I usually don't have time to examine that closely, especially when there are many items that we purchase every week. Perhaps it is time to move to a new platform...
I have called and emailed on numerous occasions to ask for them to fix it, or to explain how it functions. All I get is "we use stock quantity, time to restock, and order history to determine when to order" Or something like that. I understand they are not going to share their algorithms, but more information could be helpful for me to try to tweak my habits to help it work better. It seems to me it uses order history perhaps more than almost any other data, as it will actually recommend an item that I bought last year at about the same time of year. It does this even if I have not ordered it since and even if I have long sold out, or never sold a single item. For instance, I ordered about 80 pieces of one item one year when it was on closeout. It kept prompting me to order it again this year, even though I have been sold out for months. It seems to me that it needs to put more weight on the rate of sale (at least for my business model). Whether that means simply an average of items sold per week, or a more complex statistical distribution, I don't know, but I would think it would have to help me.
