By With a great variation of products and user buying behaviors, shelf on which products are being displayed is one of the most important resources in retail environment. Retailers can not only increase their profit but, also decrease cost by proper management of shelf space allocation and products display. To solve this problem, we propose an approach to mine user buying patterns using PrefixSpan algorithm and place the products on shelves based on the order of mined purchasing patterns. The proposed approach is able to mine the patterns in two stages of process. In the first stage, the sequences of product categories are mined to place the product categories on the shelves based on the sequence order of mined patterns.Visit here; Supermarket Racks.
Subsequently, in the second stage, the patterns (products) are mined for each category and then, rearrange the products within the category by incorporating the profit measure on the mined patterns. The experimentation is carried out on the synthetic datasets and the evaluation with two datasets showed that the proposed approach is good for product placement in supermarkets.
Due to the recent competition in the retailing industry, retailers are striving to improve their revenue in order to run their stores more efficiently. The term competition in retail is the rivalry between retailers who are keen to obtain the same customer. To improve sales and revenue, various analyses are performed by a retailer to determine which different products should be merchandized together based on the historic purchasing behavior. Recent marketing research has suggested that in-store environmental stimuli, such as shelf-space allocation and product display, have a great influence upon consumer buying behavior and may induce substantial demand (Chen et al., 2006) . Shelf-space allocation and product display are the problems of efficiently arranging retail products on shelves in order to maximize profit, improve stock control, improve customer satisfaction, etc. (Silva et al., 2009).
Nowadays, different displaying strategies directly influence customer’s purchasing decision and profit of retail stores. Product placement is an amazing bit of marketing science. The strategy Product to shelf placement is a critical retailing problem having major impact on the financial performance of retail stores. Managing this problem successfully will obviously result in overall retail store’s profit. Therefore, the decision-making process regarding this problem should be integrated to increase the retailer profitability. The decision to stock products among the large number of competing products and the placement of those products on shelves is a central question of retailing. In other words, the problem is to decide which combination of products to be displayed on which shelves that have the greatest value to customers so as to maximize the store’s total profit. A nice displaying method of products, not only attracts the sight and attention of consumers, but also increases extra consumption and customer satisfaction. Therefore, how to appropriately allocate product items on suitable shelf space becomes a very important issue in retailing business (Tsai and Wu, 2010).
