Track 15 · Applied Statistics for Professionals · Lesson 2 of 12
Customer behaviour
Summarise baskets and customer spend honestly when the data are skewed, and compare customer segments without over-claiming.
A retail director asks two questions every Monday: how much does a typical customer spend? and are our loyalty members worth more? Both have tempting one-number answers that mislead — the first because spend is right-skewed, the second because the customers who join a loyalty scheme were never the same as those who do not.
Retail analysts describe customer behaviour with a small family of basket metrics. A basket (or transaction) is one payment at the till. From the till data alone you can compute how much was spent per basket, how many items were bought, and what an item cost on average — and every one of them has a right and a wrong denominator.
Included with a Formula Quest membership
It has 8 graded exercises with feedback, hints and worked solutions. After it you will be able to:
- Compute ABV, UPT and average item price as ratios of totals
- Report the median for a typical basket and the mean for revenue totals
- Measure revenue concentration instead of assuming an 80/20 rule
- Compare customer segments while recognising self-selection