Seasonal Sales Forecasting

Forecasting sales revenue can be a difficult topic for GCSE students, since they often assume that sales figures are constant. This is especially true of products such as tea towels, which probably wouldn’t be at the top of anyone’s list of seasonal products.

Given the time of year, ask your students the following question “in which month would you expect sales of tea towels to increase sharply?”, and see whether they account for the nativity play affect!

This “Talking Retail” article could be useful for putting a figure on the rise in tea towel sales at this time of the year in order to get students to realise that sales figure do fluctuate, and sometimes for the strangest of reasons!

Another good way of getting students to work with numbers when forecasting sales is to ask them to forecast the revenue which the local football team might expect from the next four home games. They may find it useful to either research, or be provided with, attendance figures for the last few home games, or for those who struggle with numbers you could provide attendance figures from last season. This can be used to raise issues such as:
- what affects the expected revenue (e.g. Man Utd might attract a bigger crowd than Portsmouth)
- where no previous data is available (e.g a newly promoted team) forecasting is more difficult