ADVICE ON WHAT SELLS WITH WHAT IN YOUR RETAIL BUSINESS

Understanding the basket is important to retailers. By basket, we mean the shopper basket, or each transaction. What people purchase in a single transaction, or basket can inform better business decisions.

Too often retailers only look at the sales volume of single items whereas a basket analysis can be more valuable and illuminating.

For example, an item with a relatively low volume of sales could be high ranked for efficiency by appearing with other items in a basket, say, 80% of the time. This leaves it open to consideration that sales of the other items could be impacted it you stopped selling the relatively low volume selling item.

Basket penetration data points are vital if you are considering the future of a stock item. Good POS software reports on basket penetration, helping to inform management decisions.

Efficiency is measured by the basket depth. For example, an item sold alone, say, 70% of the time is less efficient in terms of basket depth than the item sold along 25% of the time. Knowing the numbers helps you make shop floor decisions aimed at improving the efficiency of a product.

In the Tower Systems POS software there are several basket analysis reports. The most often used is a report called the 10x10 Report. In its most basic form, this report lists the top ten selling items in the business and the top ten items sold with each. However, the report is much more than this as there are settings you can use to create a report suited to a specific need you may have. For example, you can look at items or departments, you can look at just one department.

Our advice is to run the report several times with different options. If you are like us, you will fall in love with the report for the insights it provides.