C-stores Making Progress on Pump-to-Store Conversions

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Convenience retailers have increased their efforts to drive fuel buyers to make purchases in-store, and their efforts are paying off.

According to the latest VideoMining C-store Shopper Impact (CSI) MegaStudy, pump-to-store conversion is up 2 percent nationwide since 2015.

“Even a 2-percent increase in pump-to-store conversion translates to significantly higher profits for the store," says Rajeev Sharma, founder and CEO of VideoMining. "In-store products have much higher margins than fuel, making fuel customers who also purchase non-fuel items extremely valuable."

Other MegaStudy findings include: 

A growing importance of female shoppers to the the convenience channel. Although men still account for the majority of c-store trips, women now account for one-third of all c-store shoppers and spend an average of 8 cents more per trip. Women are also more likely to purchase from higher-margin categories like candy or cookies and crackers, while male shoppers over-index in lower-profit categories.

The effect of millennial shoppers. Millennials — more than any other demographic — frequently meet their snacking needs at a c-store. Millennials make up 42 percent of all c-store buyers and are 40 percent more likely to make a c-store-driven trip by snacking.

The most recent CSI MegaStudy also introduced new tools to provide VideoMining clients with flexibility to analyze and explore data through the Insights Builder. This solution is a cloud-based suite of dashboards and modules that enable user-friendly access to the Big Data generated from the MegaStudy. These capabilities complement more than 40 comprehensive reports that are available as part of CSI insights package.

“Our new Insights Builder represents a big step toward what we call 'guided analytics' with an easy-to-use interface that enables users to delve into the underlying data and evolve their own learnings." stated Jeff Hershey, executive vice president, strategy & development. "With unprecedented access to Big Data on real shoppers in real stores, category managers, shopper marketers and the brands now have access to previously unmeasured insights to fine tune their strategies and execute better initiatives in-store."

This year marks the eighth edition of the CSI MegaStudy, which uses a nationwide panel of representative stores across multiple retailers to provide a channel-wide perspective benchmarking across geographic and demographic clusters.

State College-based VideoMining Corp. analyzes in-store behavior for consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers.  

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