Demand Forecasting For Wedding Supplies In American E-commerce

The popularity of the internet and continuous improvement of international logisticsnetwork system create a good environment for the development of e-commerce. After2008financial crisis, the wedding supplies market in e-commerce field has been growing rapidly.However, due to the market demand is affected by several factors, which makes weddingsupplies enterprises can not grasp the market demand. As the result, their production and salesoften mismatch and they have to bear the huge market risks and financial risks. The studyaims at finding out a prediction method which can accurately forecast the future demand ofwedding supplies, and the method will provides a scientific ground for management decisionof company.Firstly, this thesis summarizes the application status of demand forecasting models indifferent areas, and then chooses the weighted moving average, single exponential smoothing,double exponential smoothing, multiplicative model and ARIMA model to study the futuredemand of wedding supplies market. Secondly, it analyzes the market demand forecastingmethods and operating problems of LW Trade Ltd. Finally, through analyzing the salesstructure of LW and the characteristic of market environment, the wedding umbrella salesdata of LW is considered to be the research object. In the empirical analysis, first calculate theweekly sales data of LW’s wedding umbrella in the past108weeks, next establish fivedemand forecasting models with the former82weekly sales data, then predict the marketdemand of following26weeks with the five models, last compare the MSE and MAPE ofthese forecasting values. The model which has the smallest error will be use to forcast thedemand of wedding umbrella. The result indicates that the multiplicative model is the bestforecasting model for wedding umbrella.Although wedding supplies are different with mass-marketed products, we can find outthe laws of market through researching the historical data and using the scientific methods, which will effectively guide the production and sales, and meet the needs of consumers. Thevendors of wedding supplies can subtotal their sales data and use the mentioned methods inthe thesis to establish the relevant forecasting models to predict the future demand withcertain qualitative analysis, which will help them to make right business decisions.