What’s In Your Basket: Consumer Shopping Habits by Day of Week

In our last “What’s in Your Basket” post, we took a look at how receipt data can give you some eye-opening insights into the time of day that your consumers shop. In this entry, we’ll take this one step further, and look at how day-of-week might affect shopping patterns.

We’ve analyzed aggregate data collected from a sample of 2.5 million grocery receipts to reveal some patterns you may find very interesting.

Not surprisingly, weekends are the most popular shopping times for groceries. Saturday has the highest percentage of purchases (17% of total), and the second highest average spend, at $84.75. Sunday has the highest average purchase spend at $86.01, and is a close second on volume of purchases, at 16%.

How about the slowest days of the week? Thursday sees the smallest percentage of purchases, at 12% while Tuesday has the lowest average spend amount at $68.41.

Week over week, average purchase amounts and number of transactions follow a fairly predictable pattern. Midweek the footfall and average transaction sizes dip, and gradually increase through to the weekend.

The overall difference between midweek and weekends is substantial: when you factor in both the increased footfall and the higher basket sizes, average sales generated on Saturdays (the highest grossing day) are a full 66% percent higher than they are on Thursday (the lowest grossing day). Retailers and brands looking to promote their products in-store would do well to factor in this data when planning their promotions.

Before you get to the “why” your customers’ shop, you need to answer a few questions. One is “when”, and we’ve tackled the answer to this in this and prior posts. Next time, we’re going to check out the “where” aspect, and dive into some serious location data you can reap from receipts. Stay tuned!

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