How Retailiers Can Use Multi Colored Shopping Baskets to Stimulate Impulse Sales

How Retailiers Can Use Multi Colored Shopping Baskets to Stimulate Impulse Sales

Ever heard the story about the college trying to decide where to build new sidewalks on campus? The construction foreman comes out and tells them to "plant some grass, and check back in 6 months". So they go ahead and plant the grass, and six months later they show back up, take a look at where all the ruts in the grass are from people walking and the foreman tells his crew "that's where you build the sidewalks".

Wouldn't it be nice if we could do a similar experiment in our stores when trying to figure out where to place shopping baskets? It's no secret that shoppers will spend more, usually on impulse, if they have a basket available when they need them. The problem is that most stores all the carts and baskets are upfront, near the doors. That doesn't do any good when you have a shopper loaded down with stuff in their arms looking around for one in the back of the store. They simply just stop shopping and head for the checkouts and you just lost sales because they would have spent even more if they just had a basket handy when they needed it!

Of course you can't just place baskets every five feet it wouldn't make sense. Yet you want to make sure that you put them where they are needed. You want to know what areas of the store are generating impulse sales and what displays are catching the eyes of shoppers. You could spend thousands of dollars hiring a marketing firm to study shopper habits, tabulate data and generate reports that are already out of date by the time you read them. Or you could try a simple little trick that will generate some of the best insight into what your customers are really thinking and doing at a fraction of the cost.

The trick? Multi colored shopping baskets!

As crazy as it might sound, this method really works. You simple take different colored shopping baskets and put them in different zones in the store. Maybe you place some red baskets near cosmetics, blue ones near stationery and green ones by the frozen food section. Then you simply count it's as easy as that.

At the end of the day you take a tally of how many baskets of each color are making their way to the registers. You may find out some information about your customers that you would have never discovered any other way. For example, you might discover that the green baskets by the frozen food section are always gone by the end of the day, but the yellow ones by the pet products rarely get used.

Bingo! You just discovered a hot zone the frozen food aisle. Impulse shopping is taking place here and you want to make sure you have plenty of baskets on hand to help your customers and your profits!

The beauty of this method is that you can use the colors for various zones and promotions at different times. If you discover that a particular color basket just isn't moving you can easily move them to another location in the store and see if their use increases. You can even use them to sit one color by a point-of-presence display to help gauge whether it is helping increase sales, or merely just collecting dust on the retail floor.

It's one of the cheapest methods of understanding what is really happening on the sales floor, and one that give you tons of marketing and retail insight into what your customers are really thinking while in the store. Best of all, it provides a convenience to the customer while at the same time helping you continue to ring up sales and learn more about what's hot and what's not!

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