Managing retail categories has been a “thing” for decades now. Measuring sales and profits no longer sufficed as a means to analyze the success of a group of homegenious products. Space and inventory management software enabled new both brands and retailers to better understand the performance down to the individual product in the context of how much profit it returned on the basis of turns and space occupied. Even more impressive was measuring the contribution of products on the total transaction, thus being in position to determine whether certain products actually made contributions beyond the sales and profts the items produced on their own.

But as technlogy has enabled a plethora of new metrics, particularly when it comes to connecting the shopper to the transaction at the shelf, one of the most important determinant of all may now enter the mix. We are talking about the shopper’s TIME. Time in the store, time in the category, timing of their first purchase during the trip, the time it takes for a purchase decision, the time the shopper spends navigating the store as opposed to being engaged in a purchase decision. The list of time-oriented metrics are as long as they are important.

That statement is founded in the proven tenet that Time is Money, when it comes to the shopper and there is a limit to how much time a shopper will spend inside any retail store on any given trip. That means of course, if shoppers spend less time navigating crowed narrow ailses, searching for items in sku-intensive , pondering choices, and being distracted by a perponderance of signs and messages, the less time they will undoubtedly spend ……spending.

If you don’t believe me, a simple way to test this effect of this trade off is to track shoppers through your store on various times of day and days of week and link that time with their basket data and develop a baseline of who much time it takes per item in your stores. From there, repeat that process in key categories and develop a baseline for performance. From this exercise,