Shopping Model And Application Based On Consumer Behavior In Convenient Store Of Gas Station

Retail industry is currently one of the most prosperous industries in the world. Al-though the global economy stumbles, the industry is experiencing a steady growth duringthe past years. In China, the world’s second largest economy, the domestic trade is alsoprosperous in recent years.Faced with increasing intense competition and various situations in the market, re-tailers are improving flexibility in supply chain, taking various category managementstrategies to adapt to the market. At the same time, researchers are investigating con-sumers’ behavior and shopping habits to better understanding consumers.In previous studies, researchers have taken deep investigations on the fields of cat-egory management, consumers’ decision making and shopping environment, where theresults support retailers’ operation to a large extent. Meanwhile, we also find that super-market is usually taken as the research background in these researches. Despite its grow-ing importance in retail industry, convenient store rarely attracts researchers’ attention.Considering the diferences between convenient store and supermarket in operations, cat-egory variability, store environment, we believe that the research on consumer behaviorin convenient store is meaningful.We implement our research in Easyjoy convenient store in Beijing. In our study, wedevelop two experiments to investigate consumers’ shopping habits in convenient store.By collecting actual shopping path and purchase data, we use statistical analysis to revealconsumers’ shopping behaviors. Based on the experiment and statistical analysis, webuild an integrated model to describe consumers’ shopping process using random utilityframework, estimate the parameters using actual shopping data, and test the validity ofthe model. We also propose two category layout principles and use simulation method tocompare the efects on the improvement of convenient store’s operation.Our research takes convenient store as research background, using experiment, s-tatistical analysis and description model to analyze consumers’ behavior in convenientstore. Furthermore, we use simulation to evaluate the category layout design for betterprofitability, which can support convenient store’s category layout decisions.