New Product Planning

Enhanced plan

A new product has no sales history, so the forecast has nothing to work with. A launch plan fills that gap: you pick products you already sell that you expect the new one to sell like, and Logistified builds a launch forecast from how they sold after their own first sale. You fine-tune it week by week, let it feed the forecast, and order the launch stock from it.

What a launch plan is

A launch plan (a new product plan) holds one or more new products. For each of them it plans the units you expect to sell, day by day, from the launch date over the plan’s horizon. That plan is the product’s launch curve.

The curve comes from similar products: products you already sell that the new one should behave like. Logistified lines up each similar product’s sales from its own first sale, blends them by the Weight you give each one, and scales the result with Volume ×. A Volume × of 1.5 plans one and a half times what an average similar product sold. See Similar products & the launch curve.

Every launch plan gets a plan number such as NP-00001 and moves through the same statuses as every other plan: Draft, Confirmed, Locked, Completed and Cancelled. See Plan statuses & lifecycle.

New Product Planning comes with the Enhanced and Elevate plans. On a lower plan you can still open and review your launch plans, but not create or change them, and they don’t feed the forecast. See Plan requirements.

When to use it

You’re launching a product you have never sold, and you want stock ready for its first weeks.
You know which existing products it will sell like: the previous model, the same cut in another fabric, last season’s bestseller in the same range.
You want the launch to show up in the forecast and reorder suggestions before it has sold anything.

Individual products or a size group? Add a product as an individual product when it has its own launch curve. When a new product comes in several sizes that sell in a steady proportion, plan them as a size group: the product is forecast once and split across its sizes by percentage.

Use an inventory commitment instead when you expect a specific large order, and a sales plan when you want to set sales goals for products you already sell.

The list

Open Inventory Planning in the top navigation and click the New Product Planning tile (or View All Launch Plans). The list shows one row per plan:

Column	What it shows
Plan	The plan’s name and, underneath, its plan number. Click it to open the plan.
Product	The first product in the plan.
Launch	The plan’s default launch date.
Status	Draft, Confirmed, Locked, Completed or Cancelled.
Projected units	Everything the plan’s launch curves add up to.
Forecast	Feeding when the plan adds its curves to your forecast right now: Feed into forecast is on and the plan is Confirmed or Locked. Not feeding when the switch is on but the plan is Draft, Completed or Cancelled. Off when Feed into forecast is off. Excluded when the plan was excluded from the forecast through the API.

Click the Plan, Launch or Status header to sort the list. Search by name, plan number, SKU or product, filter by status, location, creation date or Launch date, and save the filters you use often. See Search, filters & saved views.

Create a plan with Create New Product Plan. See Creating a launch plan.

The detail page

The page header shows the plan number, the plan’s name under it, and the status steps on the right. Purchase orders created from the plan are linked right under the header. On the tab row, to the right of the tabs:

the location switcher, on a plan with several launch locations,
Edit details and the primary next-step button (Confirm on a Draft plan, Lock on a Confirmed one, Complete on a Locked one and Reopen on a Completed one),
Actions, which holds Edit details, the other status changes, Create purchase order (and View purchase order for each order created from the plan), Quick PDF export, Export, Rebuild forecasts, the location actions on a plan with several locations (Add location…, Remove location… and, when a location is missing products, Add missing products…), and Delete.

The page has four tabs:

Plan: the Details card, the projected demand chart, and the table with the Week grid and Volume & launch tabs. The tab counts the plan’s products, a size group counting once. This is where you build the launch. See Similar products & the launch curve.
Analytics: the plan next to what the products actually sold once they launched. See Plan analytics.
Documents: files you attach to the plan. See Exports, documents & activity.
Activity: what happened to the plan, and comments from your team.

The Details card shows the Default launch date, the Horizon in days, Total est. units and, on a plan with launch locations, Locations with their count (· All when the plan was created for all locations). A badge beside the title shows whether the plan feeds your forecast right now: Feeds forecast, Not feeding forecast or, once every product has sold with Auto-stop on first sale on, Stopped (first sale) (see Feeding the forecast). Hover or focus it to see why. Auto-stop on first sale appears when that option is on. Click the notes to edit them; they save when you click away.

Plans at several locations have a location switcher next to the tabs. All locations (summary) adds every location up; pick one location to change its similar products and settings. See Plans at several locations.

A product you delete in Shopify keeps the rows it already has on the plan, but it is never copied anywhere new: Add location…, Sync locations and Add missing products… skip it. When Add missing products… skips one, its message names the product and says it “could not be added back here because it was deleted from the shop”.

Once a plan is Locked, Completed or Cancelled, it is read-only: Edit details, Rebuild forecasts and the location actions go away, and the grid can’t be edited. A Locked plan can still order: see Ordering for a launch.

Edit details

Edit details opens a dialog with the plan-wide settings:

Name.
Default launch date. The launch date new products get when you add them. It can’t be left empty.
Horizon (days): how far past the launch the plan runs, up to 180 days. Changing it resizes the curves at every location: a shorter horizon cuts them, a longer one keeps your week edits and fills the new days from the similar products.
Default volume ×: the Volume × new products get when you add them, from 0 to 10.
Notes.
Feed into forecast and Stop feeding on first real sale. See the next section.

The default launch date and volume don’t move the products already in the plan. The dialog says so: “Default launch date and volume × apply to products added from now on. Change existing products on the Volume & launch tab.” See The Volume & launch tab.

Click Save changes. If a change can’t be saved, the dialog stays open and says why. Editing is possible while the plan is Draft or Confirmed.

Feeding the forecast

A launch plan can add its curves to your demand forecast, so the new product shows up in forecasts and reorder suggestions before it has sold anything.

Feed into forecast is on by default. The plan only feeds the forecast while it is Confirmed or Locked: a Draft plan never does, and its badge reads Not feeding forecast until you confirm it. Switch it off to keep the plan for ordering and analysis only. You can change the switch with Edit details while the plan is Draft or Confirmed.
Stop feeding on first real sale is off by default. Switch it on to drop a product from the plan’s forecast as soon as it has real sales of its own, so the forecast takes over from the plan. On a plan with several locations this happens location by location.

The switch covers the whole plan; there is no per-product switch in the app. A plan can also be paused from the forecast through the REST or MCP API, which works while the plan is Locked too. Such a plan shows Excluded from forecast on its badge and Excluded in the list. To include it again, use the same API: the app has no Include in forecast for launch plans. A plan with Feed into forecast off shows Off in the list whether or not it was excluded.

The list’s Forecast column and the badge on the Details card show which plans feed the forecast. See Plans in the forecast for how planned demand appears in the forecast.

Completing a launch

When the product has launched, click Complete (the primary button on a Locked plan, or in the Actions menu on a Confirmed one). Completing marks the plan as launched and stops it feeding the forecast; from then on the product is forecast from its own sales. If the plan’s horizon hasn’t ended yet, Logistified asks first: “Complete this plan early?”

A Completed plan can be reopened with Reopen, which moves it back to Confirmed. Its numbers stay available on the Analytics tab. A Cancelled plan can’t be reopened.

What you can do here

Creating a launch plan The Create New Product Plan dialog, section by section.

Similar products & the launch curve How the curve is built, and how to fine-tune it week by week.

Size groups Plan the sizes of one product together with a size split.

Ordering for a launch Create a draft purchase order that covers the launch.

Plans at several locations Launch at several stores, each planned from its own history.

Plan analytics Compare the plan with what the products actually sold.