When you run a Market Basket Analysis report, you’ll see the top three products that customers purchase most frequently at the same time as your products.
What you can do with Market Basket Analysis
Here are some of the things you can do to improve your brand’s performance using Market Basket Analysis:
Target your ads: A great use case for this report is finding other products to target with sponsored product ads. It is most useful to target products that have fewer reviews, a lower BSR, or higher prices than your ASIN. This contextual information is not provided by the report and needs to be added manually.
The only word of caution here is that the Market Basket Analysis report can be ‘noisy’. People leave items in their basket for many reasons and often buy unrelated products. Some common sense and long-term comparison analysis can help you determine which products you should be targeting and which you should ignore.
View combination percentage figures: According to Amazon, this is the percentage of orders that contain both your product and the number-one purchased product, in comparison with the total number of orders that contained at least two different items, including your product. This can help you determine which items are most relevant to your customers, helping you to identify cross-sells and up-sells.
Most of the items listed in this report don’t belong to you. However, this gives you insight into which items are a complement or substitute for your products. But, again, this data can be ‘noisy’ — and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Build better bundles: Market Basket Analysis is the study of bundling. In simpler terms, Market Basket Analysis strives to arm brands with the data necessary to understand shoppers’ purchase behaviors, which allows you to create bundles customers want to buy. Building unique bundles can help you increase sales and average order value. If there isn’t another comparable bundle, you aren’t competing against anyone.
What you can’t do with Market Basket Analysis
While Market Basket Analysis can help you build better bundles, it cannot do the following:
Explain the ‘why’ of customer behavior: Basically, Market Basket Analysis reports show the result, but not the motivation. You do not know how or why bundled products arrived in the same shopping cart. You cannot tell if a shopper purposely searched for and purchased the two items as a pair, or if the pairing was coincidence. Drawing connections and making inferences here is likely to involve some guesswork.
Access relevant data on low-volume products: Your product needs to have a high sales volume for Amazon to generate meaningful Market Basket Analysis data. To compile data, Amazon relies on significant numbers of customers purchasing the same item along with yours. For most items there is not enough similar buying behavior for Amazon to generate meaningful data.
