Above average

In June we made 322 sales for a total revenue of $8,522 (including GST to make the numbers relatable). This means the average sale was $26.50, a bit above our usual of around 23 dollars. (Basically people usually buy about two books and they cost about 12 bucks each.)

But beware the average! So misleading.

This graph shows how much each individual customer spent, ordered from least to most. Each bar represents one sale.

The least was a refund of 18 dollars. The most was a customer who spent 350 dollars! (And if you feel an urge to spend that much as you read this, I can suggest a place for you :-)

There were 289 sales of less than 50 dollars. And 33 sales of 50 dollars or more.

Another way of looking at the spending per customer is to group them by how much they spent. This graph shows customers split into four roughly equal sized groups (so there are about 80 customers in each group).

Much as we appreciate all of our customers, you can see that the highest-spending ones are disproportionately important to our overall revenue. Encouraging more of them in store would be a smart move for us.

Recall that each slice of this pie is about the same number of customers. If every customer spent the same, the slices would be the same size.

Instead:

  • Half of customers spent 16 dollars or less and accounted for 18 per cent of revenue.
  • The quarter of customers who spent between 16 and 28 dollars accounted for about a quarter of revenue.
  • And the highest-spending 80 customers accounted for nearly 60 per cent of revenue in June.