Distribution and logistics industries contribute some of the biggest GDP(gross domestic product) in South Korea and the number of related companies are quarter of the total number of industries in the country. The number of retail tech companies are quickly increased due to the acceleration of the online and untact shopping trend. Furthermore, major distribution and logistics companies try to achieve integrated data management with the fulfillment process. In contrast, small and medium distribution companies still lack of the capacity and ability to develop digital innovation and smartization. Therefore, in this paper, a deep learning-based demand forecasting & recommendation model is proposed to improve business competitiveness. The proposed model is developed based on real sales transaction data to predict future demand for each product. The proposed model consists of six deep learning models, which are MLP(multi-layers perception), CNN(convolution neural network), RNN(recurrent neural network), LSTM(long short term memory), Conv1D-BiLSTM(convolution-long short term memory) for demand forecasting and collaborative filtering for the recommendation. Each model provides the best prediction result for each product and recommendation model can recommend best sales product among companies own sales list as well as competitor’s item list. The proposed demand forecasting model is expected to improve the competitiveness of the small and medium-sized distribution and logistics industry.

Due to COVID-19, changes in consumption trends are taking place in the distribution sector, such as an increase in non-face-to-face consumption and a rapid growth in the online shopping market. However, it is difficult for small and medium-sized export sellers to obtain forecast information on the export market by country, compared to large distributors who can easily build a global sales network. This study is about the prediction of export amount and export volume by country and item for market information analysis of small and medium export sellers. A prediction model was developed using Lasso, XGBoost, and MLP models based on supervised learning and deep learning, and export trends for clothing, cosmetics, and household electronic devices were predicted for Korea's major export countries, the United States, China, and Vietnam. As a result of the prediction, the performance of MAE and RMSE for the Lasso model was excellent, and based on the development results, a market analysis system for small and medium sellers was developed.