Abacus has launched BuyerPoint, a suite of analytical services designed to help retailers who are members of the Abacus Alliance understand buyer behavior and improve retail performance throughout the life of a store.
Lafayette, CO-based Abacus said BuyerPoint combines the buying behavior data from the Abacus Alliance database with advanced analytical services to help store-based retailers improve store placement decisions, launch new stores and drive ongoing incremental retail traffic within trade areas.
The Alliance database brings together customer transactional information from 620 participating members – and growing – and holds information on 18.5 million mail order purchasing households.
BuyerPoint also provides retailers with ways to identify under performing stores through store planning packages and trade area specific modeling.
The retail cycle begins with the identification of a new store location. BuyerPoint includes site evaluation analysis, which helps retailers determine the most ideal areas for new stores. In the past, retailers have often relied only on demographic data or group-based clustering to determine new store locations.
With the launch of BuyerPoint for retail site evaluation, Abacus offers retailers a complete picture of customer purchase activity in potential markets based on actual transactional data housed on the Abacus Alliance in 74 different business-to-consumer or 16 different business-to-business product categories.
The BuyerPoint site evaluation process identifies the best potential markets for a retailer using a weighted analysis of transactional data from the Abacus Alliance. This includes actual purchase data from competitive retailers and existing sales in similar markets. The purchase data combined with advanced mapping technology identifies and ranks potential new store locations. The full analysis incorporates total category spending potential, the presence of competitors, traffic patterns and drive times to ensure that retailers can capture sufficient market share within a geographical area to justify a new store.
Following site selection, retailers must identify the best areas to target around the new store and maximize campaign efforts that drive incremental retail traffic. Many retailers define their trade areas by the radius around a store location. Whether that radius is mileage-based or drive-time based, there are potentially ZIP codes that may not be profitable when mailed inside the radius and some that fall outside of the radius that may be highly profitable if properly targeted and mailed. BuyerPoint geo-modeling assists retailers with pinpointing the most profitable ZIP codes to mail promotions to in and out of these radii based on consumer’s buying behavior. Through the analysis of a weighted combination of the retailer’s own transactional level purchase data, Abacus Alliance transactional data, drive time and traffic patterns, Abacus clients have found they can reduce the number of unprofitable ZIP codes to which they mail — often by as much as 50 percent — while generating as much or more store traffic.
