State of Shopify Inventory Forecasting — Q1 2026
First-party Q1 2026 forecasting benchmarks — MAPE, lead-time variance, and stockout frequency — aggregated from anonymised Forthcast merchant data.
TL;DR
- Aggregate of 590 anonymised Shopify merchants (3,072,789 SKUs · 7,670 forecast runs).
- Average MAPE: 26.7% · Lead-time variance: 3.47 days · Stockout frequency: 7.29%.
- Per-category breakdown across 9 Shopify storefront verticals (≥30 merchants per bucket — K-anonymised).
- Citation-friendly under CC BY 4.0; downloadable as PDF and machine-readable Dataset JSON-LD.
Avg MAPE
26.7%
Lead-time variance
3.47 days
Stockout frequency
7.29%
Anonymised merchants
590
Per-category breakdown
Aggregated to Shopify storefront category. Buckets with fewer than 30 merchants are dropped or rolled into "Other" so no single store can be re-identified.
| Shopify category | Merchants | SKUs | Avg MAPE | Median MAPE | P90 MAPE | Avg lead time | Lead-time variance | Stockout % | Median weeks of cover |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel & Accessories | 95 | 517,090 | 31.8% | 31.8% | 40.6% | 17.6 d | 4.25 d | 6.99% | 10.9 |
| Beauty & Personal Care | 80 | 402,644 | 23.8% | 23.7% | 32.6% | 11.8 d | 2.7 d | 8.35% | 10.6 |
| Home & Garden | 75 | 385,159 | 29.5% | 29.9% | 38.1% | 21.3 d | 3.97 d | 9.67% | 11.4 |
| Food & Beverage | 70 | 359,519 | 19.5% | 19.6% | 27.6% | 8.4 d | 3.1 d | 4.75% | 10.6 |
| Health & Wellness | 60 | 305,786 | 21.7% | 21.5% | 30.9% | 11.7 d | 2.44 d | 8.17% | 11.0 |
| Other | 60 | 331,430 | 29.6% | 29.7% | 38.4% | 15.8 d | 3.58 d | 6.1% | 11.0 |
| Sports & Outdoors | 55 | 283,644 | 34.1% | 34.5% | 43.0% | 19.4 d | 4.69 d | 7.14% | 10.6 |
| Electronics | 50 | 258,293 | 26.8% | 26.8% | 35.1% | 24.0 d | 3.94 d | 5.84% | 10.7 |
| Pets | 45 | 229,224 | 21.0% | 21.1% | 29.6% | 9.6 d | 2.11 d | 8.24% | 10.3 |
Quote-ready stats
Each statistic below is sized for direct citation under CC BY 4.0 — no permission needed, just credit Forthcast and link back.
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Across 590 anonymised Shopify merchants, the average demand-forecast MAPE in Q1 2026 was 26.7%.
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Lead-time variance averaged 3.47 days across the 590-merchant cohort in Q1 2026.
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7.29% of SKU-weeks experienced a stockout across the cohort in Q1 2026.
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Sports & Outdoors merchants posted the highest average MAPE (34.1%); Food & Beverage the lowest (19.5%).
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Home & Garden stores stocked out on 9.67% of SKU-weeks — the highest of any Shopify category in Q1 2026.
Methodology
- Source data. Forthcast app DB — `forecast_runs` (per-merchant weekly MAPE + lead-time stats) and `sku_demand_history` (per-SKU weekly stock position).
- Time window. 2026-01-01 to 2026-04-01.
- Anonymisation. Aggregated to Shopify storefront category. Buckets with fewer than 30 merchants are dropped or rolled into 'Other'. No merchant, store, or SKU identifier is published.
- MAPE. Mean Absolute Percentage Error per merchant per forecast run, averaged across the period. Reported as mean, median, and P90.
- Lead-time variance. Standard deviation in supplier lead time (days) per merchant, averaged across the cohort.
- Stockout frequency. Share of SKU-weeks where on-hand units fell to zero before the next replenishment arrived.
- Licensing. Aggregate metrics are released under CC BY 4.0 — cite as 'Forthcast, State of Shopify Inventory Forecasting' with a link to the report URL.
Forthcast (2026-05-03). "State of Shopify Inventory Forecasting — Q1 2026." Aggregate dataset, CC BY 4.0. https://www.forthcast.io/state-of-shopify-inventory-forecasting-q1-2026Machine-readable Dataset JSON-LD is embedded in this page so Google Dataset Search and other indexers can pick it up automatically. The full PDF and a press-kit one-pager are available above.
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