Sell Impulse Items to Serve

If you’re like most retailers, you identify certain items as suited for impulse purchases. You price these items to yield especially high profit margins, and you merchandise the items in places like the cash/wrap. One rationale is that the customer is ready to pay, so open to adding on some extra purchases. And the underlying tone among certain retailers is that we’re tricking the person into buying more by catching them off-guard.

      But selling what we call “impulse purchase” items depends less on tricking the customer than we might have thought. Research indicates that most shoppers make plans to make unplanned purchases. A University of Pittsburgh and Baylor University study was conducted at several Texas grocery stores. Before starting their shopping, participants were asked to estimate how much they planned to spend. For more than 75% of the shoppers, the amount they thought they’d spend altogether was more than the amount they estimated to be the cost of items they planned to buy. These shoppers had prepared themselves to come across both needs they’d forgotten to include on their shopping list and items they wouldn’t realize they wanted until the items were in front of them or in their hands. Some of the study participants even explicitly said they intended to make impulse purchases.

      Then the researchers found even more evidence that shoppers carefully plan to do the unplanned: It turned out that the shoppers were very accurate in predicting how much they’d spend altogether. The average overall difference between predicted spending and actual spending was only 47¢.

      Most of your customers intend to spend a certain amount of money on impulse items. Accommodate them by stocking the right sorts of items in the right places and offering the items in ways that carry an impression of service, not trickery.