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FAQS

Data

Which metrics are available in free supermarket data?

Whilst each supermarket provides its own unique dataset, there’s a lot of commonality between them. All provide a daily feed that summarises detailed item-level performance from the previous day, including:

  1. Store Sales; value (£) and volume (units)
  2. Store Stock (closing and/or opening units)
  3. Inbound Store Service; units expected, units received
  4. Depot Stock (closing and/or opening units)
  5. Inbound Depot Service; cases expected, cases received

Read the full article here.

Related questions:

What data can I collect from UK supermarkets, as a supplier?

The traditional ‘Big Four’ UK supermarkets (Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco) all provide data and reporting tools for their suppliers to help them to understand their trading performance. These are commonly referred to as ‘retailer portals’ and all provide some tools and data free of charge to their suppliers.

Free data is typically limited to a supplier’s own performance i.e. you will only be able to see how your products are selling, where they are stocked, and how they are moving between depots and stores – you will not be able to see the same for competitor products (for that you will need to purchase ‘category data’ from the likes of NielsenIQ or Circana).

Read the full article here for more information.

Related questions:

What is data grain?

The ‘grain’ of data refers to how detailed (high-grain) or aggregated (low-grain) any given data is in relation to the real-world phenomena that it describes.

This is fully explained in our full article here.

Pricing

How much does a demand signal repository cost?

Firstly, let’s establish what we mean by a Demand Signal Repository (DSR) - then we can consider different flavours, what the cost drivers are and suggest typical costs for varying degrees of sophistication and capability. Starting with some definitions:

  1. A DSR is a centralised database suitable for data about demand (very generic);
  2. A DSR provides a central location to store, manage and retrieve multiple different types of ‘demand signal’ - information that directly or indirectly describes demand for products or services; or,
  3. In the grocery retail / consumer goods space, a DSR provides a central, consolidated store of many different demand signals - acquired from retail customers, market data aggregators, social networks, internal systems etc. - and often provides a means to match these with corresponding supply signals to enable analysis of product demand and the ways in which it is affected by supply, price, brand sentiment, weather, retail channels and many other explanatory variables.

The full article here will focus on the third of these - DSRs designed for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies - which is where our expertise and experience lie. We will get to budgetary costs by the end but need to sketch out the landscape first.

Related questions:

Analytics

How do I analyse supermarket data in Excel?

This is a common question raised by salespeople, customer service team leaders and analysts from many departments. There are many approaches but we can group these into a few similar ‘flavours’ and then look at typical approaches for each of these, before taking a look at what ‘best practice’ analysis looks like. Let’s start with the basic scenarios.

Most supermarket suppliers want to understand how their products are selling in their customers’ stores, so Sales Analysis is the normal start point for everyone. This allows you to address questions like:

  1. How are my products selling week-on-week; are my sales growing or declining?
  2. How are my products selling before, during and after a promotion that I ran with a supermarket chain?
  3. Which of my products is selling best? Should it be available to shoppers in more stores?
  4. Which of my products are struggling to sell well - do they risk delisting?
  5. How do my products sell in different formats and regions?

To perform these types of analysis you will need to:

  1. Ensure you have a valid account for the relevant ‘retailer portal’ (online reporting tool)
  2. Log into the retailer portal and navigate to the relevant report(s), typically:
    1. Sales by Item & Week
    2. Sales by Item & Day
    3. Sales by Item, Store and Day
  3. Run the relevant report(s) and download the results - opting for “XLS”, “XLSX” or “CSV” as the file format
  4. Open one of the downloaded files in Microsoft Excel
  5. Build summary tables, pivottables, charts etc. which analyse the data to address the questions that you want to answer

You can read our full answer to this question here.

Other recommended reading on this topic: