Why We Buy by Paco Underhill Read Free Book Online Page B

data, they’re still wondering how they can turn that information into an ongoing, proactive, workable tool. For store managers it can be frustrating when the home office fires off numbers, and they respond, “Well, of course we have lower conversion numbers, because we get more casual, time-killing people in the door; as you might notice, we’re located next to a kitchenware store and thus attract an entire army of exiled male spouses.”
    Still, a great many businesspeople don’t know from conversion rate. It’s not one of the ways of measuring a business that business schools emphasize. It’s not about profit margins or return on investment ormoney supply or any of that. It’s all about what happens within the four walls of the store.
    I can think of other underutilized ways to measure what happens inside a store. Once I asked a major cosmetics executive how much time women actually spent shopping for makeup per store visit.
    â€œOh, about ten minutes,” he said.
    â€œHmm,” I replied, knowing from the study we had just completed for him that the average shopper spent two minutes in the cosmetics section. The average shopper who bought something spent only thirty seconds more. Putting it into broader context, the average supermarket visit is about twenty-five minutes, including checkout. The average time spent in a hypermarket, or multidepartment store—whether a Wal-Mart Supercenter in the U.S., a European Carrefour, or a Pick n Pay in Cape Town, South Africa—is about thirty minutes. That’s stopwatch time. But if you ask someone how long he or she spent in a store, that person will often double that number. In any commercial setting, time comes in three forms. There’s real time, there’s perceived time and then there’s a combination of the two.
    Now, the amount of minutes a shopper spends in a store (assuming he or she is shopping, not waiting in a line) is again an important factor in determining how much she or he will buy. Over and over again, our studies have shown a direct relationship between these numbers. If the customer is walking through the entire store (or most of it, at least) and is considering lots of merchandise (meaning he or she is actually looking and touching and thinking), a fair amount of time is required. In an electronics store we studied, nonbuyers spent five minutes and six seconds in the store, compared to nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds for buyers. In a toy store, buyers spent over seventeen minutes, compared to ten for nonbuyers. In some stores buyers spend three or four times as much time as nonbuyers. A great many factors contribute, one way or the other, to the length of a shopping trip, and studying them is most of what we do. The majority of the advice we give to retailers involves ways of getting shoppers to shop longer. But you’ve got to know how long people spend shopping your store or your product before you can know how to increase it.
    The flip side of that measure is what we call the confusion index, or the number of people walking around stores completely at sea. Remember that time is relative, so if the ten minutes you spend at a Target or Wal-Mart is spent walking in circles, it’ll feel like you’ve been in there for a half hour. And in the end, while you may stumble on something good, if you can’t find what you came in for, what’s the point? One of the major victories we have won in the past ten years has been with office product superstores. In 1997, whenever Staples, OfficeMax or Office Depot opened a new location, they used a warehouse format. Shelving ran twelve to fifteen feet in the air—making it a challenge, to say the least, for customers who didn’t shop the store every week to find stuff. In many aisles, a third of the people there weren’t shopping for anything in that aisle. They were browsing, or killing time, or, far more often, they were utterly