An approach to products placement in supermarkets using PrefixSpan algorithm

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. 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. (C) 2012 King Saud University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.