by Leigh Goessl

Created on: November 06, 2009

Grocery discount cards are very useful on many levels. For consumers they offer savings or perceived savings on grocery items and this attracts many people to apply for a card, but for grocery stores, the value is so much more.

Those convenient and simple cards with the bar code are very helpful to grocery stores to gain a lot of insight and information about their customers and their buying habits. In fact their attributes are considered so valuable other kinds of stores have followed suit and have developed their own discount programs using cards or other similar approaches.

The bottom line is these discount cards offer more than just discounts to the customer. In fact the information gleaned from customers far pays for itself in terms of a return on investment.

While it is true businesses give customers a lower rate than they advertise which can cut in on their profits, the analysis and level of information that these cards provide are a tangible way to increase profitability and this outweighs the potential revenue lost from the discounts offered.

Here are some of the ways grocery stores use discount cards for more than just discounts:

*Information about Customers buying habits

With every swipe of a discount card a grocery store can ultimately see what consumers are buying, how often they purchase it, when they tend to buy and how much of each item they put in their carts per visit. The analysis reports generated from those discount cards provide a full scope of everything a grocery store wants to know about their customers and their buying habits.

*Tracking

In addition to individual purchases in a given timeframe or other designated criteria, grocery discount cards enable the store to track purchases over long periods of time. This helps them identify trends and gives them a birds' eye view of which products are successful, which are undesirable, and any other kind of tendencies shoppers exhibit. The ability to track purchases is a very powerful tool for both the short term and the long term.

*Notice Trends

The aforementioned trends are noted and this helps grocery stores identify ways to increase profitability and decide who to target with special promotions, coupons or simply see how much people are willing to pay for any given kind of item. Noting this quantity of demand is extremely useful to grocery stores.

*Evaluate Products

Watching consumer buying habits and trends also help grocery stores evaluate products; for instance if a specific product sits

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