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🗓 How is the Launch Date calculated?
🗓 How is the Launch Date calculated?

This article describes various activation methods that Style Arcade offers to determine the Launch Date for a product.

Updated over 3 months ago

💡In this article you will learn about:

  • How Style Arcade captures launch/published dates across

    different channels in order to facilitate accurate sell-through analysis.

  • The different Supported Activation Date Sources.


✅ Supported Activation Date Sources

Date of First Sale

  • Style Arcade will automatically use the Date of First Sale as an launch/published date source

  • For channels with pre-orders or advance wholesale orders, providing a reliable alternative is available, this behaviour can be disabled

What you can customise:

  • You can ignore sales with $0 or specifically sales orders with Shopify tags e.g. influencer, PR

  • Criteria can be based on revenue amount, specific locations, order tags etc. - anything you can see in the source file (e.g. shopify orders) can be used

  • You cannot prioritise this over other sources of activation dates

Online Published Date

  • Style Arcade can use the Published Date from an e-commerce platform

  • Shopify natively supports this, and Style Arcade will capture the earliest value (as some products are taken down and re-published)

  • Magento2 must be customised to support this

  • For BigCommerce this can be inferred by capturing the earliest date that the product was set to "available"

Date of Stock Arrival

  • This is typically used to track activation across a retail store network

  • The obvious downside is that there may be a delay between when the stock is delivered and when it is put on the floor, but providing this happens within the same week it will be sufficiently accurate

  • This is not advisable to use for online activation unless the online store has a dedicated warehouse set up in the ERP

What you can customise:

  • You can decide to not activate on specific locations

Flat File

  • A flat file that can identify both the product and launch date can be used as a source of activation date

  • This is typical in push-style integrations with ERPs providing that the launch date is tracked in the ERP

  • It's also possible to provide a manual file (CSV, Excel or Gsheet)


📌 Rules

Option 1: Default

  1. For each channel, Style Arcade will take the earliest of the following:
    - Activation Date supplied by eCommerce or flat file
    - Date of first sale
    - Date of first stock arrival

  2. If none of the above is present, it will mark the product as Not Yet Launched

Option 2: Prioritise the online published date

  1. Style Arcade will use the Shopify online published date: customers can choose between the initial or the latest published date

  2. If the above is NOT present, Style Arcade will take the earliest of the following:
    - Date of first sale
    - Date of first stock arrival

  3. If none of the above is present, it will mark the product as Not Yet Launched

Option 3: Strict activation

  1. For each channel, Style Arcade will use the following if present:

    1. Activation Date supplied by e-commerce or flat file

  2. If none of the above is present, it will mark the product as Not Yet Launched


👀 Example configurations

  • Online Channel

    • Use published date if it’s available

    • Use date of first sale, only if published date is not available

  • Online Channel

    • Use published date or date of first sale, whichever is earliest

    • Don’t activate on $0 sales or sales tagged with “influencer”

  • Online Channel

    • Use published date for activation date

    • Ignore everything else (only use published date)

  • Retail Channel

    • Use date of first stock or date of first sale, whichever is earliest

    • Don’t use date of first stock in replenishment warehouse

When there is a combined channel such as Total Business, it will take the earliest launch dates against the product among all channels.

NOTES:

  • Style Arcade can take an activation date from a flat file or eCommerce platform and apply it to any channel - for example, some retailers may wish to see their online launch date when analysing wholesale sales

  • Style Arcade typically cannot take a date of first sale, impression or stock arrival in one channel and apply it to another (however there are exceptions)


Got any questions? Feel free to reach out to our in-app chat for assistance! 🤩


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