Executive Summary

Small- and mid-sized e-commerce merchants — roughly 6 million globally — regularly lose sales and waste cash due to stockouts or overstock caused by volatile demand; industry estimates suggest missed sales and expedited replenishment can cost SMBs 2–7% of revenue and create persistent operational drag. This is most acute for DTC brands and fast-moving consumables sellers that run frequent promotions and depend on paid acquisition, where forecast errors cascade quickly into stockouts and high fulfillment costs. You could build an API-first inventory intelligence product that forecasts demand at the SKU-store level using historical sales, ad spend and supplier lead times, then triggers automated reorder alerts or one-click PO creation; at an $800 ACV per merchant this targets a roughly $4.8 billion addressable market. Core features would include promotion-aware forecasting, ad-signal ingestion, safety-stock recommendations and native Shopify/commerce-platform integrations to automate replenishment workflows. Automation reduces manual ops and delivers measurable ROI for merchants who increasingly accept delegated workflows. The timing is favorable because the rise of DTC brands increases demand volatility (raising the value of accurate forecasts), platform app stores lower distribution friction, and SMBs are more willing to adopt automation. You can compete effectively by prioritizing prediction accuracy for promotion-driven spikes, offering deep, platform-native integrations and prebuilt supplier connectors, but be candid about the hard parts: noisy and incomplete merchant data, variable lead times across suppliers, and the upfront need to prove ROI to keep CAC and churn under control.

Market Opportunity

Avoid stockouts by forecasting demand and automating reorder alerts targets a $4.8B = 6M e-commerce SMBs × $800 ACV for inventory intelligence and alerts total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 12% YoY — Statista and multiple industry reports show commerce tools and automation adoption growing mid-teens.

Key trends driving demand: Rise of DTC brands — as more merchants rely on paid acquisition and short-lived promotions, demand volatility increases and forecasting becomes valuable.; Platform APIs and app stores — Shopify and other platforms make distribution and integration easier, lowering adoption friction.; Automation acceptance among SMBs — more merchants accept automated workflows (auto-reorder, PO creation) to reduce manual ops.; Lower-cost ML infrastructure — managed ML and forecasting APIs make probabilistic forecasting affordable for small vendors..

Key competitors include Inventory Planner, Zoho Inventory, DEAR Systems.

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Avoid stockouts by forecasting demand and automating reorder alerts

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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