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Secret #39:

Order Starters Generate Incremental Demand

In many order entry systems, the first item the customer wanted to purchase is listed first, followed by the second item, third item, and so on.

If we make the assumption that the first item started the order, we can learn an awful lot about the areas in our catalogs [website pages] that capture customer attention.
hillstrom multichannel secrets

Sit down with your business intelligence team, and ask them to rankorder the items in your catalog [website] based on where they appear in an order.

The report should be sorted from the lowest average position — “orderstarters” — to the highest average position– “add-ons”.

Focus your efforts on merchandising the first twenty pages of your catalog [the home page and top-level prodcat pages] with order starters.

Kevin Hillstrom, from Hillstrom’s Multichannel Secrets

Kevin Hillstrom is really smart, and his new e-book is excellent. Hadn’t before considered analyzing merch purchased by position on the invoice. Clever. And that’s just one of Kevin’s 59 tips.

Link: Hillstrom’s Multichannel Secrets, PDF or paper, over at Lulu.com

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  1. Kevin Hillstrom, May 18, 2008:

    It’s a secret that works! I learned something about customer behavior at every company I worked at, and for every client that asked me to perform an analysis of this nature.

    And quite honestly, the secret is more relevant in the online world than in the catalog world. Because the merchandise assortment is “random” on a website and “fixed” in catalog, one can quickly learn “hidden” items on a website that deserve landing page or home page attention.

    Another fun analysis — see if advertised items (e-mail, catalog) are order starters or not — when advertising is effective, you’ll often see that the advertised items are order starters.

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