Paper 11

Analysis of customers spatial distribution through transaction datasets

Authors: Yuji Yoshimura, Alexander Amini, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Josep Blat, Carlo Ratti

Volume 27 (2016)

Abstract

Understanding people’s consumption behavior while traveling between retail shops is essential for successful urban planning as well as determining an optimized location for an individual shop. Analyzing customer mobility and deducing their spatial distribution help not only to improve retail marketing strategies, but also to increase the attractiveness of the district through the appropriate commercial planning. For this purpose, we employ a large-scale and anonymized datasets of bank card transactions provided by one of the largest Spanish banks: BBVA. This unique dataset enables us to analyze the combination of visits to stores where customers make consecutive transactions in the city. We identify various patterns in the spatial distribution of customers. By comparing the number of transactions, the distributions and their respective properties such as the distance from the shop we reveal significant differences and similarities between the stores.