Customer basket weight prediction for Tesco
Tesco is one of the biggest names in home shopping in the UK. Millions of customers rely on Tesco for their weekly grocery shop, with these numbers only increasing during the pandemic.
Tesco needed to understand and predict when customers are likely to add large heavy items to their online shopping basket. Tesco’s delivery vans are typically small vans, which are able to turn in residential streets, and have a maximum load capacity of 800 kg. Customers’ orders are often in the range 20-50 kg, and one driver typically visits up to 30 customers’ homes in a trip. Customers are typically allowed to modify their baskets until midnight the day before their delivery. This can cause problems with logistics, since a large last-minute change to an order can push a driver’s load over 800 kg. For this reason, Tesco wanted to better understand and predict customers’ shopping preferences, in particular customers’ order weights.