Skip to main content
This is a beta feature. Treat every recommendation as a starting point, not a decision — check quantities against what you know about your store and vendors before you submit.Vori switches purchase order recommendations on store by store. If you don’t see a Purchase orders card on your inventory settings page, your store isn’t in the beta yet — email support@vori.com to ask for an invitation.
Every morning, Vori looks at what you’ve sold, figures out what you’re likely to sell before your next delivery from each vendor, and drafts a purchase order to cover the gap between that and what’s already on your shelf or on order. Nothing is ever sent without you. Each recommendation shows up as a draft order that you open, adjust, and submit yourself. You have the choice of receiving recommendations as either one order per vendor, or as a handful of multi-vendor orders. The multi-vendor orders are grouped by expiration time—the time after which the recommendation may no longer be valid—buckets of one, three, and seven days. Multi-vendor support is configurable store-wide on the inventory settings page.

​
How a recommendation gets built

1

Vori refreshes your sales picture overnight

Vori updates your sales history for every item and every day.
2

We check which products have enough history to predict

A product only gets a recommendation if it has sold on at least 180 separate days over the last two years, and at least once in the last 30 days. That bar is intentionally high: an item you move once every few weeks has no real pattern to go on, and something you’ve stopped carrying shouldn’t quietly show up on an order again.Items sold by weight are left out of this entirely, as is anything you’ve excluded yourself — whether for one product or a whole department.
3

We work out how far ahead to plan, per vendor

Vori reads a year of your invoices to learn how often each vendor actually delivers to you — not a schedule someone typed in once. A vendor needs at least six deliveries in the past year, with at least one in the last six months, before Vori will plan around them at all.Vori then plans past your next delivery, not just up to it. A vendor who comes weekly gets roughly ten days of coverage, so an order carries you into the delivery after next rather than running you down to empty the day it arrives.If you receive from a vendor but never invoice through Vori, there’s no delivery rhythm for Vori to read, so that vendor produces no recommendations.
4

We set a target coverage level and calculate a quantity

How much Vori suggests depends on the type of product:
  • Dairy, eggs, and other essentials: covered about 19 days out of 20. An empty milk shelf is the most visible gap in a store.
  • Most grocery items: covered about 9 days out of 10.
  • Highly perishable produce: covered about 4 days out of 5, accepting the occasional gap on purpose, since over-ordering here turns straight into shrink.
From there, Vori subtracts what’s already on your shelf and what’s already on its way, then rounds up to whole cases.

​
Turning it on

1

Enable recommendations for your store

Turn on Purchase order recommendations on your inventory settings page. You need an admin account for the store to change this setting.This is the main switch. If it is off, Vori will not make any purchase order recommendations.
2

Choose which vendors to cover

Purchase order recommendations are enabled for every vendor by default so you never have to remember to enable them for new vendors. You can disable recommendations for a vendor by following the steps below.
  1. Find your vendor at app.vori.com/retail/vendors.
  2. Click the button on the row to open the detail page.
  3. Disable Purchase order recommendations on the Profile tab.
Vori will no longer draft recommendations for this vendor. All pre-existing recommendations will remain until you cancel them or they expire.
3

Check which vendors are covered

Open the vendors with recommendations enabled view to see the active vendors Vori will draft orders for. You can also add the PO Recommendations column to the vendors list yourself from the column chooser.
Recommendations are drafted overnight, so the first ones show up the morning after you turn the feature on rather than straight away. If a vendor still has nothing after that, see If recommendations look thin or aren’t showing up below.

​
When Vori leaves an item off a recommendation

Vori would rather show nothing than a number it can’t stand behind:
  • No case size on file. If Vori doesn’t know how many units come in a case, it skips the item rather than guess.
  • Already covered. If your shelf stock and open orders already meet the forecasted need, no additional inventory is needed.
  • Implausibly large. A suggested quantity that works out to more than about five weeks of normal sales is dropped — an obviously wrong number is worse than a missing one.
A vendor will also only ever be on one open recommendation at a time. Vori won’t suggest more for a vendor while a draft is still sitting there unsent, and an untouched recommendation expires partway through the delivery window. On a multi-vendor store, vendors are grouped by how long their recommendation stays good for, so you get up to three orders: one to act on today, one within three days, and one within the week. That way a weekly supplier’s suggestions are not thrown away overnight because a daily supplier shares the order.

​
If recommendations look thin or aren’t showing up

Three things have to be true for Vori to recommend an order, and having two out of three still means you’ll see nothing:
  1. Sales history. A store without enough sales history recorded in Vori won’t yet have products that clear the history bar.
  2. Invoices in Vori. Delivery rhythm comes from your invoices — a vendor you never invoice through Vori stays invisible to this feature.
  3. Vendor catalog with costs and case sizes. This is what turns a forecast into an actual orderable line.
Your vendor catalog will usually show you which of these is missing. See Preparing your store for ordering launch for getting that data in shape.