Customer purchasing patterns help compose a clear picture of the customer engineering process. These patterns are measured to provide in-depth customer and product-customer relationship profiles.

The measurement of factors affecting purchasing patterns includes customer budgets, purchasing time cycle, logistics of each purchase, and the purchasing authority.

Budgets

This refers to the breakup of the customer's purchasing power, such as how much they spend on the product category, how much they expect to pay, and so on.

Time Frames

This consists of an analysis of the purchasing time cycle. It takes into account how often the product is purchased, replaced, or repaired. For example, a car may be purchased once in 5 years, whereas a loaf of bread is purchased every day.

Order Process

Takes account of the preferred mode of purchase such as mail order, off the shelf, or the Internet.

Decision-Makers

These are the persons in the customer's family/organization who take the decision on the purchase. For instance, the customer of a new banking software may be the bank teller, but the decision-maker is the operations manager of the bank.

Factors Influencing Purchase

An analysis of the reasons why customers prefers the product - availability, quality, positioning, packaging, after-sales service, quantity, etc.


A detailed composite of the above-mentioned factors is put together as a typical analysis of customer purchasing patterns.