People’s behavior is repetitive when it comes to visiting and spending in shops, according to a new study.
An international scientific study, in which the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) has participated, has concluded that consumers are a lot more predictable than they seem as it is quite possible to foretell where they are going to buy in the future by looking at their past shopping patterns.
This is the main discovery of an international scientific study, in which the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) has participated, which reveals how to predict people’s shopping patterns.
This research study attempts to identify just how predictable we consumers are with respect to shopping patterns.
In order to carry out the study, Esteban Moro of the Department of Mathematics at UC3M and colleagues analyzed hundreds of thousands of de-identified economic transactions made with credit cards on both sides of the Atlantic.
The goal was to find the ‘predictability’ of the time series of consumption in almost a year’s worth of credit card purchases made by more than 50 million accounts. “What we found”- the researcher points out- “is that people are quite regular when visiting (and purchasing in shops and that there is quite a bit of ‘predictability’, above all in the long term”. To put it another way, it is difficult to predict where your next purchase will be on the basis of where you are doing your shopping now.
However, as Professor Moro indicates, it is possible to know with a fair degree of probability where you will go shopping during the next month. In short: we go back to the same shops with remarkable regularity.
As pointed out by the researchers, the study has various applications that range from geomarketing (marketing in specific areas of the city), provision of points of sale, locating cash tellers or detecting fraud. There is still not enough information available to the researchers as to whether this data can be extrapolated to cash operations.
The study has been published in Scientific Reports. (ANI)