We don’t have a loyalty scheme, but want to use our EPoS data to get some insight into our customers’ spending habits. What should we be looking at?

Although a loyalty card helps to track a consumer’s spending patterns over time there is a lot you can do with basket analysis alone, says LMG Insight & Communication client solutions director Michael Poyser.

He suggests that rather than thinking about what you can do with your EPoS data, retailers need to look at things in the opposite way. “Decide what your issues are, such as footfall, availability or not being good enough on value, and then you can tailor the data analysis to the issues you have.”

For instance, you might analyse what products are bought together in baskets to help judge promotions or store merchandising effectiveness. LMG is working with Sainsbury’s to analyse when stores have availability problems. It cross-references expected sales of products against actuals and where there are major differences indicates the hours of the day when products were missing from the shelves.

Poyser adds that by looking at the types of baskets in terms of average spend, type and number of items, as well as the time of visit, retailers can work out what type of shopping trips their customers make at different times of the day, week or even year.

Another use for basket analysis is to benchmark your stores. Poyser says that spend per basket is a useful additional metric when working out a store’s performance. It can highlight where certain types of stores are performing below potential, which pure sales data alone might not show.