It is important to understand how customers move around stores, but what really matters is to understand why they visit stores. Instead of obtaining this information via surveys, we have developed a statistical analysis by which we cluster shopping journeys and classify them by categories. In order to do so, all the shopping journeys are analyzed and classified based on different aspects such as the hour of the journey, the day of the week, the type of shopping tool used, etc.
Thanks to this information we have four types of shopping missions:
- Fill-in: When customers visit a few grocery sections to find products that have got over.
- Regular stock-up: When customers visit a wide variety of sections to fill the refrigerator for the upcoming weeks.
- Urgent item: When customers visit one or two sections which they urgently need and ignore all other categories.
- Daily shop: When customers visit some categories required for daily use with a focus on fresh and perishable items.
With this information we can identify which is the prevailing type of shopping mission in our store, as well as the distribution by days of the week and the characteristics that define each mission (type of shopping tool used, minutes spent in store, sections visited, etc.).