What’s in Your Basket: How Much Do You Actually Know About the Time of Day Consumers Shop?

There’s no question that time of day yields considerable impact over consumer spending, but tapping into this data without access to POS can be exceedingly difficult. Fortunately, receipts are date and time stamped, and we extract this data from every receipt we process, thereby allowing clients (and you!) insight into when their shoppers purchase their product.

Most People Shop In The Afternoon (between 12pm and 6pm)

In this collection of data aggregated from our brand programs, you can see how “time of day” influences shopping habits. As displayed above, most of the receipts submitted were from shopping trips during three key time periods: “morning”, “afternoon”, and “evening”. Relatively few shoppers choose to make shopping trips at “noon” (it is possible that consumers own lunchtimes take priority over shopping) and “late” (a relatively inconvenient time for most people).

People Spend More at Noon Than Evening

The previous data suggests that the afternoon is a popular time to shop. But is this correlated with how much consumers are actually spending? Here, we can see that even though consumers shop much less at noon overall than they do in the evening, they tend to spend a lot more at noon (over $10 on average!). In fact, those who shop at noon spend the most when compared to any other time of day (below is a graph comparing all times of day and the spend during these periods). This could be for many reasons; perhaps many consumers are also buying a lunchtime meal for themselves on-top of their planned shopping duties? Keep in mind that these spend values are averages over the entire week. In order to understand the meanings behind these values better, data from day-of-the-week could also be examined.

Time of day is important, but day of week is another critical variable that can be incredibly informative for brands and their marketing strategies. Stay tuned for our next blog entry for the “What’s In Your Basket” series, where we’ll consider the implications that day-of-the-week has on shoppers!

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