Instacart Customer Analysis
Overview
Motivation
Instacart prides itself in providing excellent customer service, and that can only be accomplished by understanding and preemptively responding for their customers’ needs.
Objective
Instacart wants to uncover information about their customers by exploring their sales patterns. The purpose of this exploratory analysis is to derive preliminary insights and suggest strategies for better segmentation based on the provided criteria.
Scope
This analysis covers Instacart sales data from 2017 to develop present day insights.
Conclusions
When are people shopping?
In order to determine when to send targeted ads, we first need to understand when customers are shopping.
Most customers are shopping on Sundays between 10 am and 3 pm. While average cost product purchased does not change much over time, it should be notices that the cheapest items are bought during 10 am.
Sunday morning would be an ideal time to promote deals since most customers shopping during that time are looking for a deal. Otherwise, sending shopping reminders or promoted previously bought items should be done in the afternoon with customers are most active.
Who are the customers?
Next, we need to understand who the customers are in order to anticipate what they may want to buy.
I used metrics such as number of dependents, household income, and age to create 5 customer profiles. Must customers are parents in a dual-income home.
Since most customers are dual income household parents, we should also push items for children wants as well. Ethically speaking, we need to balance things kids may want (junk food and snack) with things that kids need (fruits and vegetables).
What are customers buying?
The final aspect to consider is what customers are actually buying.
Customers regardless of profile are shopping predominately in department 4 - Produce, Dairy, and Eggs. The only exception is for Single Parents whose top category is tied by Produce, Dairy, and Eggs and Snacks. These trends are also seen on the regional level
Most advertisements should be in Produce, Dairy, and Eggs for most customer customers. Customer marked as “Single Parents” would also respond well to Snack ads.