MARKET BASKET ANALYSIS
After placing customers within appropriate clusters, discovering profitable shopping behaviors is the next hurdle. Reviewing the market baskets of your customers is not difficult. Deciphering this information is complex. You want to keep the best customers and drive more people in your stores to be just like them.
Market basket analysis, what people buy each time they shop with you, is the key to this and, many times, why they do this is not intuitive. What people buy changes over time. It can vary seasonally, or because of fad or fashion. Pricing, promotions, product in-stock condition, all come into play. Location in the store, catalog or on the website, even the time of day can matter. This analysis is very complex for an individual buyer to undertake and do thoroughly.
The market basket analysis system helps the merchant with real world decisions like these:
- Should products with high affinities be merchandised in the same area of the store, or apart?
- What affinities work best for end caps or check lanes?
- When should affinities be on sale at the same time?
- What does the market basket tell us about the most common paths taken through the store?
- How do gross margin percent and gross margin dollars vary by day of the week? How do they vary by ad days?
Our basic market basket system analyzes SKU sale clustering. We then work with the client to examine how and why the basket changes over time. The information is stored and continually interpreted, becoming more predictive with use. This system uncovers high profit generators and provides data to enable the merchant to make better merchandising decisions. It allows the merchant to see and measure how they are affecting customer-purchasing decisions.
