We are proud to announce that Lokad now has a native integration for Piwik, an open source web tracking software. In short, Piwik is just like Google Analytics, except that it gives your company full control over your own web traffic data. In particular, it makes sense not to trust the same company with both your SEM (search engine marketing) spendings and your web conversion metrics: Piwik gives you precisely that.

Predicting the next trends is a tough problem in most verticals. Some verticals, like fashions, are even more erratic than others, making the problem even more acute. From Lokad’s data science perspective, any data that could prove valuable in identifying these trends more accurately is welcome. Leveraging the historical sales data is obvious, but what about the web traffic itself?

Customers start looking for products before they buy them. While most customers won’t give you a six month head-start in browsing the product they intend to buy, they are likely to give you some hints a few days in advance (from time to time). This extra information could be put to good use, and make the difference between a product that is immediately available and a product that ends-up out-of-stock at the worst time possible.

The idea of leveraging this behavior from web visitors isn’t new. There is an entire industry known as behavioral retargeting dedicated to this very challenge from a marketing perspective. However, Lokad is now bringing this perspective to supply chains. More than ever, the future of supply chains will be online.