What is velocity?
Velocity is the rate of shopper activity on a product over a given time window — views per hour, add-to-bags per day, purchases per week. It is the pace at which demand is moving, measured directly from first-party behaviour. Where a single view is a demand signal, velocity is the flow of those signals over time.
How is velocity measured?
Flockr maintains running counts of views, add-to-bags and purchases for every product across several rolling time windows, from the last few minutes out to the last several days. Each counter updates as events arrive and rolls forward as the window moves, so velocity is always current rather than a periodic batch calculation.
How is velocity different from momentum?
Velocity is absolute pace; momentum is acceleration. A product can have high velocity and no momentum — a steady best-seller holding at a hundred views an hour is moving fast but not speeding up. A product can have low velocity and high momentum — a niche product going from five to ten views an hour is small but accelerating. Velocity tells you how much is happening; momentum tells you whether it is changing.
What is velocity used for?
Velocity feeds nearly everything downstream: thresholds are checked against it, lifecycle states are derived partly from it, and it is the raw pace that momentum, demand spikes and rank changes are computed from. In the portal, velocity charts plot views, add-to-bags and purchases together so the shape of demand over recent days is visible at a glance.
See velocity in the platform
The demand intelligence layer maintains live velocity for every product across rolling time windows.