STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- The average fuel customer spends four minutes and 26 seconds on the fuel island, according to the latest heat-map study from VideoMining. It's a brief period of time but seems a veritable eon compared to how little time--less than two minutes--is spent inside a convenience store.
Each timeframe presents a stage upon which to influence a purchase decision, but not many retailers are truly dominating that opportunity, Priya Baboo, executive vice president of shopper insights and strategy for VideoMining, told CSP Daily News.
"It's relatively easy to convert people walking into the store because they're in the store and you have so many opportunities to drive conversion among those customers, [such as] signage for deals where you buy something inside the store and get a discount," she said, citing the example of retailers such as Altoona, Pa.-based Sheetz, which offers gasoline customers a discount toward an in-store purchase or a free item such as a cup of coffee.
"Even offering a $1 discount for same-day purchases when you pump gas could be one way to drive loyalty," she said. "This is the low-hanging fruit: How do we leverage it? How do we use it to increase conversion?"
VideoMining Corp., based in State College, Pa., produces the annual C-Store Shopper Insights (CSI) Program, a research effort that documents the c-store shopping trip. This fourth iteration of the study, conducted in the late summer 2012 and shared exclusively with CSP, included 10 convenience store chains representing 144 stores in 20 markets.
See the July issue of CSP magazine for a complete report on the heat-map study.
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