Grofers is one of the biggest players in the Indian household and grocery market, catering to 25 cities across India. I tried to analyze the buying patterns and ordering habits of people on Grofers platform. The exercise was aimed at getting a greater insight into an essential part of a consumer’s lifestyle — daily needs.

The analysis has been done in R using ggplot2 as the visualization tool.

The data consists of orders only from the cities of Delhi-NCR and Bangalore. The time period is from October 2016 — present. The magnitude of figures on the y-axis has been removed from some reasons due to company privacy policy.

Ordering habits by daytime

How the ordering habit of people varies by Day of the Week.

We can see that people order the most on Saturdays and Sundays, i.e — weekends. Looks like people want to order when they are free and do not have work pressure on their minds.

2. How the ordering habit of people varies by Time.

The graph has two main zones. 10am:12pm and 6pm:10pm. People are ordering mainly during the night time with a large percentage ordering during late mornings also. The peaks in the mornings can be attributed to housewives who have some time on their hands after the breakfast and before the afternoon lunch preparations. The period between 1pm — 5pm is relatively slow, maybe due to the fact that people feel lazy and lethargic after lunch hours.

3. How the ordering habit varies by Day of the Week & Time of the Day .

It is clear that a large number of orders are done on the weekends primarily at noon time. This is possibly due to the fact that people are mostly free on weekends. People wake up late on weekends and a lot of them have plans in the evenings to go out. This leaves noon and late nights as feasible options to sit down and think which commodities are required for the household and what should be ordered.

Also, people ordering on weekdays predominantly do it after 7 pm, presumably after coming back from work.

This knowledge is quite helpful as it allows us to stock up inventory on the relevant days and time and also target audience for marketing before the rush hours. It also gives our tech team additional information about the need to scale up and prepare for high load on our servers during the peak hours. Another cause is probably because a lot of marketing campaigns are run on the weekends which leads to a rise in the order volume on Saturday and Sunday.

What the carts reveal

1. Number of items bought in each cart.

Peaks can be seen in the above graph from 1–6 and then the peaks start to ebb. Thus, it is clear that most people prefer to keep their cart size small.

2. Which items are most frequently ordered?

Name Aashirvaad Shudh Chakki Whole Wheat Atta

Fortune Soya Health Refined Soybean Oil (Pouch)

Best Value Refined Sugar

Onion

Potato

Lemon

Tata Salt

Best Value Arhar Dal/Toor Dal

Lady Finger

Coriander

Atta (flour) comes across as the most frequently ordered item by the customers followed by soybean oil, sugar and vegetables i.e. among all items these are the items which have been bought the most. These items are what we would expect to be used regularly in Indian households.

3. Which items are most frequently reordered?

Name Reordered % Nestle a+ Nourish Toned Milk (Tetra Pak) 46% Mother Dairy Toned Milk (Tetra Pak 41% Aashirvaad Shudh Chakki Whole Wheat Atta 41% Mother Dairy Toned Milk (Polypack) 40% Mother Dairy Full Cream Milk (Polypack) 39% Nestle a+ Slim Skimmed Milk (Tetra Pak) 38%

This table shows the number of times that a product was reordered among all the times that it was ordered. Milk and dairy products are the most frequently reordered items which seems to be quite intuitive as these products have small shelf lives and need to be replenished quickly. This is also quite consistent with what Instacart has shown on their blog revealing that American and Indian markets align on this finding.

4. Frequency of Re-Ordering

This graph shows interesting results. Though a lot of highs are seen in the first week with little discernible difference, a little further along the graph, if observed carefully, shows regular peaks in intervals of 7 days. Clearly, the general ordering pattern is that people reorder items either during the first week or they come back weekly after their previous order. This is an indicator that items at homes finish weekly and then restocking is required. The graph also shows that if people don’t order within the first week, their probability of reordering drops down continuously. The peak on the 4th day may be due to the fact that Grofers supplies fruits and vegetables along with dairy products which have to be ordered on a regular basis as these are perishable items and need to be consumed quickly.

The number of items in a cart are used as a health metric for our category team, who analyze carts with low items and see which category of products are not getting discovered by our users.The number of items in a cart are used as a health metric for our category team, who analyze carts with low items and see which category of products are not getting discovered by our users. A view of most bought items provides us with information on the products which need to have a high visibility and availability so that they never go out of stock. Analyzing the frequency of reordering has helped us to work on customer churn and identify users who drop off before the seventh day. This way marketing can target those customers to bring them on the platform again.

A peek into the ordering habits of customers proved to be quite exciting, revealing patterns into their buying behavior. We’ll continue to expand this post as and when we get additional insights.