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Best Practices for Creating Choices: Repeat vs. Extend

When building assortments, you’ll often need to decide whether to repeat or extend an existing choice. Understanding the differences will help you manage strategies, inputs, and product lifecycles more effectively.

Updated over 2 weeks ago

Toolio Best Practice: Utilize Repeat Over Extend

At Toolio, our recommended best practice is to use Repeat instead of Extend in most cases.

Why? Because repeating a choice provides greater flexibility and control when planning:

  • You can adjust ROS (Rate of Sale), Clusters, Pricing Changes, Return Profiles, Grow Rates, and other strategies independently by season.

  • The use of repeating saves time by pre-populating a ROS using a ROS model, while still allowing you to tailor strategies for the current assortment.

  • Retrending continues until either the end date or 78 weeks into the future, whichever comes first. Using repeat doesn’t push trends unrealistically far forward.


Repeating a Choice

Repeating a choice is ideal when you want more control over strategy inputs for each period or assortment. This approach allows you to adjust:

  • Rate of Sale (ROS)

  • Clusters

  • Ticket Changes

  • Return profiles

  • Other key assumptions independently

Repeating also leverages a ROS model, which pre-populates ROS - saving time and using data driven decisions to adjust ROS overtime.

Creating a Repeat Choice

If your use case is to reintroduce a choice that was used in previous assortments:

  1. Open the Compare mode by clicking the Compare button.

  2. Select your reference repeat choice(s).

  3. Right-click on the Compare grid.

  4. Select the Repeat option.

  5. Enter a Cluster Group for the choice in order to save the placeholder.

What happens when you Repeat:

  • A new assigned choice is created.

  • Launch and End Dates match the current assortment.

  • All attributes from the reference choice are copied over.

  • The ROS model is defined by the choice ID from the choice definition. The timeframe used to calculate the ROS is driven from the timeframe used in the compare screen.


Extending a Choice

Extending a choice is not the current Toolio recommendation. Using this option will carry forward a choice into a new assortment timeframe without changing attributes or allowing changes.

Creating an Extended Choice

If your use case is to continue an existing choice into the current assortment:

  1. Open the Compare mode by clicking on the Compare button.

  2. Select your reference extend choice(s).

  3. Right-click on the Compare grid.

  4. Select the Extend option.

  5. Enter a Cluster Group for the choice in order to save the placeholder.

What happens when you Extend:

  • The End Date is updated to match the new assortment’s End Date.

  • The Launch Date remains unchanged.

  • No attributes are changed.

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