According to Amazon, the Market Basket Report is where “You can identify cross-selling and bundling opportunities by gaining insight on products being purchased together by your customers.” Market Basket Analysis, in essence, is the study of product bundling (on Amazon or in a brick-and-mortar store). You may have run across it on Amazon many times while doing your shopping. Are you buying paper towels? Why not buy this nice paper towel holder? In the market for a new TV? You might need an HDMI cable – and Amazon knows that.
In this blog post, we will discuss five things to know about the Market Basket Report.
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Not Just Anyone Can make a Market Basket Report
While we would all love to research product trends and analyze this kind of data, brands can only access the Market Basket Report if their brand is registered with Amazon. If you have not registered your brand, be sure to do that first, as it will provide you and your brand with a wealth of benefits and opportunities.
Market baskets are for Complimentary Items
Market basket reports, and, by the same logic, Market Basket Analysis in general, is specifically looking to provide insights on Complimentary items. If you were buying tires on Amazon, it would not be particularly beneficial to recommend a soda machine.
Market Basket Reports should display your brand’s frequently purchased items with complimentary items. There is much more nuance to this aspect of the Market Basket Report, but we will cover that later. First, it is beneficial to know how to generate a Market Basket Report.
Making a Market Basket Report is Simple
Luckily, Amazon has made this process incredibly simple compared to how complex the data is.
To make a Market Basket Report, follow these steps. In your Amazon Seller Central page:
Click “Reports.”
- Click “Brand Analytics” (it should be second from the top). From here, you will go to the consumer behavior dashboard.
- As a quick aside, this is where you can see all the other reports such as the “Alternate Purchase Report” and the “Item Comparison report.”
- On this page, you will see the “Market Basket Report.” Click this.
- Once here, you can begin work on your Market Basket Report.
- Select your time frame (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) and you will yield different results from each.
You can run a Market Basket Report on a particular ASIN you are interested in, or you can run a report on a keyword that you know triggers your product to be shown.
The Market Basket Report only shows the top three products most frequently purchased.
So here is where it gets interesting. Let’s say you ran the report for July. The report will show you the products people purchased with your product that month. More specifically, your product plus three others will have to have been in the same shopping cart and purchased to count on this report.
Additionally, this report will provide you with a “Combination Percentage.” According to Amazon, this is “The Percentage of orders that contain both your product and the other purchased product, in comparison to the total number of orders that contained at least two different items, including your product.”
So, your product has probably been purchased hundreds of times, but not always with “complimentary” items. It would likely not be very beneficial for you to learn that your plastic hangers were bought with Bluetooth headphones, which is why Amazon often does not show these in the report. However, opting for only the top three will likely show your hangers bundled with other laundry items. Likewise, the Market Basket Report will not show when your product was purchased with competing items. For example, it won’t show your hangers bundled with a competitor’s hangers.
The Market Basket Report can help you gain access to the coveted “Frequently Bought Together” badge.
You want your product to be in the shopping cart of a popular, complimentary product as frequently as possible. Of course, right?
You can ensure this by first, searching for popular products related to a keyword that your ASIN shares.
But there are not many ways to buy your way onto this list. This is where Amazon’s organic algorithm kicks in and shows only customer behavior. However, there are ways around this. If you create a “Product Targeting Ad,” you can bypass the organic structure of Amazon’s recommendations.
Hopefully, this article gives you a good sense of what a Market Basket Report is and how best you can use it to increase sales on all your ASINs. Amazon provides some incredible information for those brand owners creative enough to dig in! If you need help or more insights, don’t hesitate to reach out to the experts at Laser Sight Digital. We are happy to help!
