How much does it cost to analyse supermarket data?
In its simplest form, analysing supermarket data is entirely free! Any supplier to the ‘Big Four’ UK supermarkets, for example, can perform useful sales analysis with nothing more than an account on each of the ‘retail portals’ and a suitable spreadsheet tool (Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, for example).
Most organisations, however, will want to understand their recent performance in the context of long-term patterns and this presents a few challenges:
- Retailers tend to provide detailed data only for recent events; usually the last few weeks
- Some data (e.g. stock levels) is only presented as a daily snapshot
- Downloading all available data every day takes a long time and is impractical
