User guide for Lokad ASP.NET Sales Forecasting
If you have not setup your application yet or if you want to change your settings, you may consider our
setup guide.
How it works
LASP is not a stand-alone application, LASP works on top of two others applications:
- an ecommerce application (your webshop) that provides the sales history.
- an analytics application (Lokad.com) that provides the sales forecasts.
Thus LASP is a mash-up used to retrieve the forecast reports in a convenient manner. LASP does not compute the forecasts, it sends the sales data to Lokad, and then retrieves the forecasts from Lokad. See the
Lokad technology for further details.
Uploading sales data
If you click the button
Upload data, then your sales history will be uploaded to Lokad. Since the upload process can takes a little while (depending on the amount of data that you have in your sales history), the upload will occur in the background. You will get a line of feedback indicating "Uploading..." as long as the upload process is under way.
Privacy: You may be concerned by the fact that your sales data gets transmitted to Lokad. to be completed. Please note that your products are anonymized before being uploaded to Lokad. Indeed, no details about your products are actually send to Lokad. Thus, Lokad only gets a list of products named product1, product2, product3 ...
Tip: Once the upload is complete, you can
log into your Lokad account and check, from the
My Data section, that the sales data have been uploaded correctly.
Downloading sales forecasts
If you check the box
Display forecasts, the sales report will include the sales forecasts. Since the forecasts are actually downloaded from Lokad, your sales data must have been uploaded first, otherwise no forecast will be available for display.
We actually suggest to wait 24h before downloading the forecasts after an upload in order to get the best possible forecast accuracy (see
Upload ASAP, Download ALAP). In any case, the forecasts become available as soon as the upload is finished.