CLUSTERING AS A TOOL FOR OPTIMIZING THE SALE OF CONSUMER GOODS

Radek Kratochvíl, Mária Jánešová

Abstract: Nowadays, most sales of consumer goods are realized by e-shops. For these shops, of course, it is impossible – in terms finance and/or space - to have large quantities of these goods in stock. It is therefore necessary to reduce the offered goods in a suitable and sophisticated way. In this work, based on the knowledge of historical data and using the Cluster Analysis, the sales offer of these goods is optimized. Here the supply of goods is reduced depending on the price and the sale time using the real data. With this reduction, only a certain type and quantity of goods can be stocked within a certain time period to be offered at that time period. The entire supply of goods is selected by individual clusters that determine what goods, at what prices and in what time period are at a certain moment beneficial to sell. This therefore reduces the total sales offer and hence the need to own or fund unnecessarily large warehouses. The cluster analysis is applied to the real data of laptop sales in a medium-sized e-shop in the Czech Republic for the period 2016.

Keywords: clustering, consumer goods, optimization, warehousing

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2017.0616003