Promo Effectiveness: Home retail, Epicor data, Merchandising decisions
Ward pulls from sales orders, inventory, purchase orders from Epicor, tracks promos throughout 50,000+ home SKUs, and sends the merchandising read daily.
Promo Effectiveness for Home on Epicor, scoped to merchandising
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward returns insight cards scoped to merchandising decision-making.
Promo Effectiveness, in one sentence. Ward measures true promotional lift net of cannibalization, pull-forward, and pantry loading.
Applied to Home Improvement, the surface area is 50,000+ SKUs across stores. Project-based purchasing, long-tail SKUs, and seasonal volatility. Ward manages the complexity of 50,000+ SKU environments with ease.
How Ward sends Promos insight cards: Ward isolates incremental volume from baseline, measures cross-SKU cannibalization, estimates pull-forward effects, and calculates true ROI.
Setup: Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse.
The short list
- Promo ROI scorecards
- Net lift measurement (not gross)
- Cannibalization quantification
- Pull-forward detection
Chat
Ask anything. Ward routes to the right agent and returns cited answers.
I pulled the spring pre-build against the last three seasons and the weather signal for the 22 Southeast stores.
| Signal | Finding |
|---|---|
seasonal_prebuild | Mulch on-hand hit 61% of plan the week temps broke 70°F |
dc_push | DC push started 9 days after the first-warm-week trigger, LY it was 2 |
attach.project | Soil and edging attach fell 18% at stores that gapped on mulch |
Recommend: tie the push trigger to the 10-day forecast instead of the calendar week, pre-position two truckloads at the 8 stores that gapped, and re-set the attach endcap.
seasonal_prebuild…
Reporting
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries. Every number re-derivable from its SQL.
| Model | Horizon | MAPE |
|---|---|---|
holt_winters | 4wk | 4.1% |
arima_sarimax | 13wk | 8.9% |
gbm_demand | 1wk | 2.1% |
bayes_hier | new store | 11.4% |
Sources
Connect external systems to the data lake.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
epicor_pos_transactions | import | 2m ago |
epicor_special_orders | import | 2m ago |
netsuite_inventory_snapshot | import | 14m ago |
retail_seasonal_prebuild | import | 1h ago |
retail_sku_velocity | import | 1h ago |
retail_pro_account_sales | import | 1h ago |
retail_weather_daily | import | 1h ago |
Policies
Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
merch-read-default | permit | Model::* |
pro-team-read-accounts | permit | Model::"pro_account_sales" |
vendor-blocked | forbid | Model::"labor_*" |
supply-read-orders | permit | Model::"special_orders" |
Why Promos matters for Home retail
Home improvement promos drive traffic spikes, but most promotional purchases would have happened at full price within 30 days, the customer was already planning the project. True incrementality comes from triggering project starts, not discounting items already in someone's plan.
Why this combination
is its own problem.
Epicor is the system of record for most home operators of your size, which means the readings Ward needs are already there. The gap is not data collection. It is that nobody has time to read sales orders and inventory every morning across every store.
- 01 Pro customers and DIY customers respond to promos completely differently; chain-wide ROI averages obscure that Pro promos often have lower incrementality than DIY events.
- 02 Major holiday events get evaluated on weekend revenue lift, missing 30-day pull-forward and post-event demand drag that erode net incrementality.
Benchmarks. Home improvement holiday promo events show 40-90% gross weekend lift but typically 5-25% net incrementality after pull-forward and post-event drag. Project-starter bundles usually deliver 2-4x the incremental basket value of single-item percentage-off promos.
What Ward has eyes on.
Coverage is store by store, category by category. Ward monitors project basket value, seasonal accuracy, long-tail turn throughout 50,000+ SKUs and compares each store against its own baseline, not against the chain. That is the difference between knowing the fleet is fine and knowing which seven stores are not.
Ward pulls from sales orders, inventory, purchase orders from Epicor on a read-only connection. Nothing is written back, and your ERP configuration does not change. Epicor stays the system of record.
The promos model runs each day, not on a reporting calendar. It spots the pattern, explains the cause, and attaches what to do about it before the number reaches a review deck.
At the metric level. Ward measures project-start incrementality, pull-forward rates by category, Pro vs DIY promotional response differences, and project basket value vs single-item sales. A 30-day pre/post window captures the full demand-shifting effect.
What the first 90 days
actually look like.
-
01
Week 1: connect
Read-only credentials to Epicor. Ward reads sales orders, inventory, purchase orders and starts building baselines. First insight cards land inside 48 hours, before baselines are stable, so you can see the shape of the output early.
-
02
Weeks 2 to 3: baselines
Ward needs roughly two weeks of history per store to separate a real deviation from normal variance. During this window the insight cards are directionally right and the thresholds are still moving.
-
03
Weeks 4 to 12: operating rhythm
Findings arrive on a daily cycle and get triaged like any other queue. Most teams find the volume settles into something one person clears in ten minutes. What matters is the action rate, not the alert count.
How Ward connects to Epicor
Ward integrates with Epicor for home improvement, furniture, and building supply retailers. Inventory, purchasing, production, and sales data power insight cards.
Setup: Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse.
Data Ward reads from Epicor
Impact metrics with Epicor
Data lake enrichment
Ward enriches Epicor data with: Sales orders, Weather & events, Contractor/Pro data, Competitor pricing, Vendor scorecards
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets.
- ×Promo planning still runs off last year's playbook
- ×Assortment reviews happen quarterly when they should happen daily
- ×Price changes chase the market a week behind it
- ×No visibility into true cannibalization across categories
- ×Vendor negotiations lack real-time sell-through evidence
- ✓Insight cards flag promo cannibalization the day it happens
- ✓Assortment gaps and whitespace opportunities surface automatically
- ✓Price elasticity shifts detected before margin erosion compounds
- ✓Category-level performance cards replace manual spreadsheet reviews
- ✓Vendor scorecards generated from actual fill rate and quality data
Retailers lose an estimated $300B+ annually to suboptimal assortment and promotional decisions. Source: McKinsey & Company
Home KPI impact
Frequently asked questions
Ward measures true promotional lift net of cannibalization, pull-forward, and pantry loading. For Home retail specifically, Ward monitors 50,000+ SKUs across your stores and delivers automated insight cards with root cause analysis and recommended actions.
Ward tracks Project basket value, Seasonal accuracy, Long-tail turn, Pro customer share, Attachment rate at the store-category level. Ward isolates incremental volume from baseline, measures cross-SKU cannibalization, estimates pull-forward effects, and calculates true ROI.
Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse. Data points include: Sales orders, Inventory, Purchase orders, Customer accounts, Pricing tiers, Vendor performance.
Yes. Ward reads Epicor data and combines it with contextual signals (weather, events, demographics) to generate Home-specific insight cards. No custom development required.
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward solves this with automated insight cards: Insight cards flag promo cannibalization the day it happens. Assortment gaps and whitespace opportunities surface automatically. Price elasticity shifts detected before margin erosion compounds.
Ward delivers daily insight cards covering Project basket value, Seasonal accuracy, Long-tail turn, tailored for Merchandising decision-making. Each card includes what changed, why it matters, and what to do next.
Ward measures project-start incrementality, pull-forward rates by category, Pro vs DIY promotional response differences, and project basket value vs single-item sales. A 30-day pre/post window captures the full demand-shifting effect.
The Memorial Day event shows strong weekend revenue lift, but Ward's analysis reveals most of it was pull-forward from purchases that would have happened within 30 days, plus deal-seekers with below-average basket sizes. The highest-incrementality performers were project-starter bundles that triggered new project purchases. Ward recommends shifting future event strategy from broad discounts to project-starter bundles.
First insight cards arrive within 48 hours of data connection. Ward needs approximately 2 weeks to establish stable baselines for your specific operation.
No. Ward sits on top of your existing stack. It is the proactive intelligence layer that watches your data continuously and delivers insight cards, so your team acts on findings instead of hunting for them.
Related solutions
See what Home promos problems Ward catches.
Root causes, not just alerts. See it on your data.
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