Lokad.CQRS

BotDefender is our latest app for commerce that protects your prices from being automatically retrieved by competitors on your website. We have now a free extension for Magento and just released a new video. Enjoy!Anti-scraping service to protect ... [More] your online store from the automated retrieval of your prices by competitors. Stop being outpriced every time you make a move. Best suited for retailers. [Less]

Megaventory is a SaaS solution dedicated to inventory and order management which has made the complicated and time-consuming task of handling inventory as simple and light as it can get. With this same objective of simplicity in mind, the ... [More] teams of Megaventory and Lokad have come together to create an easy-to-use integration bridge allowing Megaventory users to extract and upload their data directly in Salescast, Lokad’s forecasting app, in just one click. So, after a few weeks of effort, and thanks to Megaventory’s development teams, we are proud to announce that Salescast’s forecasts are now just one click away from Megaventory clients. Find more information on the bridge and how to access it on Megaventory’s website. [Less]

We are hiring! Below, a copy of our LinkedIn job post. Lokad is a team of talented and passionate developers. Business is growing, commerce is more demanding than ever for innovative technologies. We are committed to delivering such technologies. ... [More] As a senior developer, you will lead the development of one of our Big Data app (check www.lokad.com for more insights in what we do). You will be in charge of bringing our technology to the next level, not to clean up technical debt. Challenges are numerous: total reliability, because nobody likes crashing a 1000 store network, vast scalability, because 1000 stores is a lot, high accuracy, because we deliver the best numbers. We expect you to bring a significant expertise to Lokad, but you will benefit from a team capable of coaching you toward your next level of craftsmanship in software design. We happen to use C#/.NET/MVC on top of Windows Azure, combined with event stores and NoSQL persistence strategies. We expect you to be (or willing to become) extremely proficient in this environment. We are located 50m from Place d'Italie (Paris 13). [Less]

We have just released a new video on our LokadTV channel on YouTube.Know when to reorder and how much to reorder with Salescast, an inventory optimization webapp based on the advance demand forecasting technology of Lokad.Stay tuned for more.

Over the last decade, competitive intelligence has evolved from an expensive venture reserved to large companies to a commoditized piece of technology where there are apps capable of retrieving your competitor’s prices for no more than a few hundred ... [More] dollars per month. This situation is putting online merchants under a considerable pressure as they are now constantly endangered of being outpriced by competitors. Obviously, merchants did not wait for the Internet to have a look at competitor's prices, however, the automated retrieval of prices on the web really changed the the scale of the practice. Being outpriced comes with massive costs: your leads are still acquired at the same price (ex: through AdWords) but your conversion rates drop because people notice that your competitor is systematically $0.50 cheaper than you. your margins drop because you have to engage in price wars in order to sustain your conversion rates; however, you usually remain a couple days behind your competitors. Today, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of BotDefender, a service to protect the prices of your online store from the automated retrieval by competitors. Without getting too much into the details, BotDefender is a lightweight technology that vastly complicates the task of your competitors (or the experts they have hired) to retrieve your prices. From the end customer perspective, BotDefender is invisible. From an SEO perspective, BotDefender is extremely respectful of all the "good" robots, that is, Google and search engines in general. BotDefender comes with an Express Plan that is free and does not expire. Moreover, the Express Plan is fully functional. Time to drive your competition nuts! Why are you still being nice and helpful with competitors? Get BotDefender now. [Less]

Shopify is one of the great online web store solutions available for small merchants. Shopify is distinctly rooted in a SaaS (software as a service) business model where not only the online store itself is SaaS, but all the add-ons provided by the ... [More] community are also SaaS. Today, we are very happy to announce the general availability of MoreForecast.com, an app dedicated to Shopify merchants, and intended as a bridge between Salescast and Shopify. Kudos to the Didisoft team for the development of MoreForecast. The app supports the automated and scheduled data transfer from Shopify toward Salescast. With MoreForecast, your Salescast reports are always based on the most recent data available. [Less]

eCommHub is one of those platform that has been optimized for drop shipping from day one, as the founder has been running his own drop-ship site since he was 13 years old. Then, while ... [More] the goal of drop-shipping is to avoid inventory altogether, sometimes, some level inventory can't be avoided entirely; and that's where Salescast comes into the picture. A dedicated Salescast export format is now available for eCommHub powered merchants. [Less]

QuickBooks is the number one accounting software for small- and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. and Canada. For years, we have received on-going integration requests to export QuickBooks data to Salescast, our inventory optimization web app. We ... [More] tried a few methods; however those initiatives did not turn out practical nor provided the smooth user experience that we were hoping for.During our exchanges with merchants over the last couple of months, Webgility was mentioned and praised for their QuickBooks integration solution called eCommerceConnector (eCC). We contacted the Webgility team, and worked closely with their developers to incorporate Salescast into eCC. Fast-forward a few weeks later, we’re happy to announce a new service for eCommerce merchants using Salescast and QuickBooks! Webgility’s eCC now supports Salescast integration with their QuickBooks integration. By connecting their QuickBooks company file and Salescast account with eCC, merchants can automatically export store data from QuickBooks to Salescast to do forecasting. In addition, eCC connects with the online store(s) and automatically records sales transactions as a sales receipt/invoice in QuickBooks. It also synchronizes products, pricing and inventory across the online channels and QuickBooks. Now eCommerce merchants can easily track sales and products, manage their accounting and finances, and grow their business with informed forecasted data. [Less]

Earlier this year, we discussed about optimizing inventory in presence of kits or bundles. Since that time, Salescast has been steadily moving forward, and we are proud to announce that support for ... [More] kits/bundles/assemblies/bills of materials is now available. All those situations have in common that the granularity of the inventory inputs (goods received) do not match the granularity of the inventory outputs (goods served). The bundle feature of Salescast allows to rewrite the historical sales data with the right granularity, focusing on consumed parts rather than consumed bundles. The bundles can be listed through the optional file named Lokad_Parts. The technical instruction are available in the Salescast section of our website. [Less]

A few weeks ago, Brightpearl, one of the most impressive commerce management software companies, was posting their success story about online merchants benefiting from better stock levels ... [More] through Salescast. If your company happens to use Brightpearl, check-out the recently revised tutorial to get started. In particular, Salescast now benefits from special features that make it much easier to extract your historical data from Brightpearl. Today, as part of the Commerce Accerelation 101 initiative of Brightpearl, we are jointly publishing a whitepaper about Quantitative Inventory Optimization. The paper details the notion of quantitative performance of the inventory. Indeed, there is a widespread misconception in supply chain, that stock levels and demand forecasts would be different things. They are not. The combination of stock on hand and the stock on order represent the true "forecast" made by your company. Hence, this is the quality of this anticipation that needs to be measured. This is a rather opinionated paper. However, we firmly believe that the classic vision (median forecasts, safety stock analysis, etc) is, simply put, nonsense when it comes to the long tail and most of the online commerce. [Less]