2023 firearm sales were on track to come in depressingly below 2022 sales. The number of June, July, August, and September NICS checks were 19.6%, 17.0%, 13.1%, and 8.2% lower respectively than 2022 checks for the same months. August 2023 checks were actually only 0.4% above 2019 levels, indicating that perhaps the pandemic-associated rise across the industry had truly come to an end. Ammunition that used to be impossible to find lined the shelves and MSRs were particularly slow to sell, some gun stores not even taking them as trade ins.

The National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers (NASGW), is adding three additional distributor data feeds to their distribution sales and inventory analytics platform, SCOPE DLX. Updates to the platform, which already tracked more than 65 percent of all new and imported firearms, will go live, August 16, 2023. 

Data isn’t the only thing that matters in business. Relationships between co-workers and customers are key, as are the often-overlooked ties between retailers and distributors. Distributors have insights and connections individual retailers don’t. Asking can make all the difference.

New to SCOPE in 2023, the Universal Dashboard offers great insight for businesses that need Market Intelligence but not the in-depth analysis offered by the higher tiers of SCOPE.  If your business is looking to maximize the value of SCOPE’s shipment and inventory data, the Universal Dashboard might be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Failing to plan is essentially planning to fail. Every industry has shifts in supply and demand around particular seasons, but it hits the outdoor industry especially hard. If you don’t order and stock guns, ammunition, and other items far enough ahead of when consumers need them, you can’t sell them. Bring in too much too late and you’re losing money on inventory. Nobody needs a turkey shotgun mid-summer. You no longer have to just guess. SCOPE provides data that drives fact-based planning.

The digital age has ushered in an era of data collection and utilization that has significantly affected the firearms and shooting sports industry. When people think of data, seemingly endless excel spreadsheets and rows of numbers come to mind. The question is — how do you use it?

There’s a range with shotguns. You either have one, old inherited pump shotgun or a small collection of target and hunting shotguns. Compared to the myriad of handgun and rifle cartridges, variety in shotguns tends to come in action type and appearance.

Cellphones, mp3 players – the original trend was to make them as small as possible. Compact, easy to transport and slip in a pocket. Nowadays, it seems as though manufacturers and the market are heading in another direction, newer phones hardly fitting in a jeans pocket with larger screens not unlike a small tablet. Storage and capacity are still top of mind, but remote cloud service storage options reduce the necessity of internal storage.