What do consumers spend per item in different shopping categories? - Share-A-Cart Data & Research
Shared on 10 November 2023, by Ed
Share-A-Cart sees a lot of shopping activity. Every month, our users share millions of items with purchasers across more than 37,000 shopping carts. Further, many of these carts are viewed and ordered, for example when the list is something that needs to be purchased at regular intervals or by several purchasers.
There is a lot of research around how much people spend per shopping trip or per month across different categories (see this article from Rocket Money, or this one from USA Today, or this one from Moody's), but we haven’t found many sites that show how much people are spending per item by category.
Retailers don’t like to share pricing publicly and consider it a trade secret, but with our data, we can shine a light on that. We looked at Share-A-Cart usage for all of October 2023 (representing 37,000 carts, 150,000 distinct products, and two million products purchased), and here’s what we found.
While it’s no surprise that consumers spend a lot more on individual electronics products vs items in other categories, the difference is larger than expected. In the electronics segment, we see spending on everything from high-ticket items like laptops, phones, tablets, and printers to cheaper goods like power cords and cable adapters, but despite the difference in purchase frequency, the average price still reaches $69.80.
Coming in at second and third places, we have office goods (things like paper, erasers, desks and chairs, and even water coolers!) followed by sporting goods.
Coming in at the 10th position, we have groceries, where the average item cost is $6.38. However, this also varies considerably. If we look at average item price by retailer, we see why:
Shoppers are making larger, in-bulk purchases from Amazon and big-box stores like Costco and Sam’s, and here the average item cost is more than $15. But for everyday food shopping, our users are generally shopping for smaller items (a few mangos, a can of soup, etc.) at local grocery chains.
From our dataset - Share-A-Cart Data & Research presents. Want more? Please see our business solutions and reach out.
