Analytics vendor Quantivo has launched a service that helps e-retailers spot consumer purchasing patterns. CEO Brian Kelly says nearly 10 multi-channel retailers have signed on for the program, which launched about a month ago.
The program, called Quantivo Retail, uses data and analytics to tell retailers what items are typically purchased together so that if a shopper is searching for one of the items, the retailer can highlight another that is commonly bought at the same time.
“It’s really simple,” Kelly says. “It tells you: ‘When a customer comes in and buys product A, this is what else they buy with it.’”
For example, Kelly, who won’t name any of his retail clients, says a merchant found that shoppers purchasing Christmas lights often bought storage bins. With such information, the merchant can now offer links or discounts on bins when it sees a visitor is about to purchase lights.
The system also can evaluate purchasing behavior over time. For instance, consumers who bought universal remotes and cables at one consumer electronics retailer were found to often end up buying a big screen television later on, Kelly says. And, in addition to answering specific questions, the analytics program can spot patterns on its own, Kelly says. For instance, it may find that sales spike for a particular product between 1 p.m. and 4 .pm. and most people that purchased the product lived in the Northeast. “Then marketing people can go to town with the data,” Kelly says.
Kelly says the Quantivo service is different from other analytics patterns that typically provide data on where visitors click, their path on an e-commerce site and abandonment rates. “We show what people actually bought and their behavior as far as the purchase goes,” he says. It’s also faster, Kelly says, because although a marketing team may be able to find this data, it would have to analyze and segment it manually. “We can find the answers in seconds and minutes, when it might take an analyst a week to sort through,” he says.
The fee for Quantivo Retailer, which is a software-as-a-service product, is based on the amount of transactions a retailer analyzes. Kelly says he’s seen retailers evaluate more than two years worth of transactions. But others, he says, may just want to analyze last year’s October and November transactions to help it decide on how to target customers over Thanksgiving.
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