Chiara Piccnotti May 14, 2014 9:00:00 AM
Do you think that if shoppers find what they’re looking for too quickly, they’ll just walk off without exploring the rest of your category? Think again.
A few months ago, an adult beverage client was grappling with a common shopper marketing problem: shoppers viewed their category as confusing. The retailers chided not to worry – “If it takes shoppers a little longer to find a product, that just means they’ll have more opportunities to discover new things they would otherwise have not considered buying!”
Our client suspected differently, and they were right.
By analyzing virtual shopping behavior, we learned that the more quickly shoppers could find their first product, the more likely they were to linger in the category and make additional purchases.
This equipped our client with the right argument to push retailers to make the category easier to shop.
Inspired by this finding, we sought to see if it applied across all categories. Leveraging our extensive archives of virtual store research data, we analyzed the behavioral patterns of 150,000 shoppers, across dozens of categories and spanning over 300 different store layouts. In doing so, we learned that, while holding category and total shopping time constant:
Every additional minute that a shopper takes to make his or her first purchase in a category reduces the final basket size by 1/2 a product.
In other words, help your shopper save a minute finding the one thing they want, and they’ll purchase an extra half product on average. Extrapolate that over millions of shoppers, and the sales impact really adds up.
Want to increase basket size? Make it easier to find that first product.
- Make sure your shelves are clearly organized.
A cluttered, confusing space makes it difficult for shoppers to find what they’re looking for, and in the end it will cause them to buy fewer products
- Focus on highlighting your top performers.
Your most popular products are the ones shoppers will most likely be looking for. Help them find those easily, and they’ll stick around and fill their baskets with extra items.
- Consider rationalizing SKUs. We tend to think that the more options we give our customers, the more products they’ll want to try out and buy. Yet variety can also be confusing, and you don’t want it to become an obstacle to finding that first key product. Remember, it’s a balancing act!
Why do shoppers buy more when they can find what they want instantly?
On one hand, it should come as no surprise. We’re busy people, and anything that saves us time is probably a good thing. The median time a shopper devotes to a single shopping mission (“buy eggs”… “stock up on toilet paper”… “find a nice bottle of wine”) is just over four minutes, and less than 15% of shopping missions last over 10 minutes.
On the other hand, it goes against conventional thinking. We often associate multiple purchases with “browsing” behavior, where the shopper isn’t looking for anything in particular. We therefore arrange our stores to highlight unexpected products and drive serendipitous discovery. This is all well and good, but our research suggests it may be counterproductive.
Perhaps—since finding that first product has such a significant impact on total basket size—we should be optimizing our stores for “search” behavior instead and enjoying the benefit of larger basket sizes.
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