During the first two weeks of quarantine, I launched a Shopify website to sell/rent home fitness equipment. It's been a great learning experience in the world of Supply Chain Manufacturing. While the site was an initial success and led to dozens of orders the first week (with no paid advertising), I hit a major roadblock that I was not expecting. My suppliers had to temporarily halt equipment manufacturing due to the emergency law that required them to start producing PPE. This led to the shortage of gym equipment nationwide. You can't even find dumbbells online.
Although my website got a lot of organic traffic and orders within the first two weeks, I was unable to fulfill most orders since manufacturing was on pause and everything was already sold out.
Since then I've continued studying SCM, and I'm also learning Python so that I can build a model to predict this kind of event in the future.
It’s hard to predict a worldwide pandemic. It’s easier, but still difficult, to predict the course of a pandemic when it first emerges. You can build a model that measures the risk of supply chain disruption vs. the cost of buying more inventory than you normally would. This could go beyond pandemics obviously.
Ah okay that makes sense. I honestly get kind of annoyed when I buy things that aren't labelled as backorders and then get told that even though I paid, they don't have stock. I'm not sure if the OP labels them as such or not
Although my website got a lot of organic traffic and orders within the first two weeks, I was unable to fulfill most orders since manufacturing was on pause and everything was already sold out.
Since then I've continued studying SCM, and I'm also learning Python so that I can build a model to predict this kind of event in the future.