Multi Colored Shopping Baskets – A Simple Tip For Increasing Retail Sales

by Randy Pickard

Quick, come over here! Take a look at that customer over in the cosmetics aisle. Her hands are full and she is pausing to look at another product and seems genuinely interested in it – these are the kind of customers we love, those who buy impulse purchases when they come into our stores. That new point of presence display must be working! Hey, wait a minute, what’s she doing? She is looking around for something and now she’s leaving! What happened? Why didn’t she purchase that item she had her eyes on? What happened to that extra sale we just lost?

The above scenario plays out tens of thousands of times a day at stores everywhere. A customer comes in for one or two items, finds their hands full, and then leaves without picking up other items they would have otherwise bought if they only had something to put it in. For the lack of a plastic basket, retailers are missing out on millions in impulse buys.

Many retailers argue that they do provide those baskets – but where do you find them at the most? Right there in the front of the store, next to the registers or door. Customers have proven time and time again they are not going to walk through the store trying to find a basket. They are simply going to pass up additional purchases and make a beeline for the registers. They are taking their money, your profits, and leaving.

Chances are you may have even tried to place shopping baskets throughout the store. They may have helped, but at the end of the day some baskets never get touched while others are constantly running out. You move them around and around again, but the customers are always eluding them. It’s like a hunt – only the baskets want to be found, but aren’t. 

Customers are strange like that. Trying to figure them out and their shopping patterns is a multi-million dollar enterprise filled with expensive marketing consultants and programs. With the struggling economy retailers are looking to make every sale they can without having to spend a fortune trying to figure out how. Little do they know the answer lies at the end of the rainbow.

Colored Shopping Baskets Give Insight to Customers and Hot Products

The good news is that retailers are figuring out how to win at the shopping basket game while at the same time gain valuable customer insight into their shopping habits through a simple, cost-effective method: using colored shopping baskets.

What do colors have to do with anything you ask? They are like our own secret GPS units for the store. By strategically placing different colored shopping baskets around the store, we can figure out where customers are picking up the baskets at, where they aren’t, what’s causing them to make impulse buys, and what’s causing them to pass by a display without giving it a second notice. Sound like pure fantasy? Read on!

Let’s take a typical store that sells general merchandise and some food items. We try an experiment where we choose 5 different colored baskets. The blue ones go right by the front door, the red ones back in the food section, the green ones near the seasonal merchandise, the yellow ones in cosmetics and finally the orange ones near a new display you have just setup. At the beginning of the day the baskets are stacked and waiting for customers. At the end of the day you notice that 6 blue baskets were used, only 1 yellow one, 10 orange ones, 4 red ones and 7 green ones.

Look at what we know just from this simple experiment – the orange ones near the new display were helping to increase sales. The customer came in for something and when they got to that display they either decided to purchase the product in addition to what they had already picked up, or the presence  of the display led them to search out for other deals – go from a browser to a shopper!

Similarly only 1 yellow basket was used. This could indicate that people shopping in the cosmetic aisle really have only one thing on their mind – the cosmetics, or they already picked up a basket. This could indicate a cold zone and the need for the baskets to be moved to another area where they would get more use.

Now imagine if you take this single day worth of data and compare it against a month’s worth. You will find in no time at all you can clearly start to see shopping patterns emerge and can start to see what encourages impulse shopping and what does not. All through a simple, cost-effective, reusable, durable colored shopping basket.

Shopping Baskets Are One of the Most Basic, Yet Powerful Tools a Retailer Has

Robert Stinnett, a expert on retailing, says that shopping baskets are often thought to be single-purpose, to help customers carry around their merchandise. Yet he sees so much more potential for them as a customer insight tool.

“Retailers often just throw a stack of them by the front door and think nothing more about it”, according to Robert. “They don’t realize that these little plastic baskets can tell them so much more and increase impulse sales if they only took a few minutes to strategically lay them out.”

Beyond helping retailers figure out where impulse buys are taking place, colored shopping baskets can also be used to help track staff customer interactions. In one grocery store each employee who is working on the floor doing stocking or resetting displays is assigned a specific color of basket. When they see a customer with an arm full of groceries they go over and offer a basket to them in their color. At the end of each week the employee who has given out the most baskets wins a prize. It was an ingenious way for the store to boost customer interactions and satisfactions and get the employees involved in the process as well!

“The past two years have been challenging for many retailers”, says Robert, “but the ones who are surviving and pulling through are looking at programs and ideas such as using colored shopping baskets to help them get a better idea of what exactly today’s consumers are looking for when they are inside the store. At the end of the day some retailers trying these new, innovative methods find out that the simplest ideas can sometimes reap the biggest rewards.”

Randy Pickard is the General Manager of Shopping Baskets Plus, a supplier of plastic shopping baskets to retail stores. and the editor of Internet Marketing Remarks.