Market researchers examining in-store shopping behavior are increasingly asking us for virtual shelf functionality.
Traditionally, researching this subject has been done by setting up physical displays and inviting shoppers to the relevant locations. However, this is an expensive exercise. And since the coronavirus pandemic, online methods for capturing shopping behavior have become very popular.
In response to this rising demand, we have been working with ConceptSauce to understand their solutions and develop a means of incorporating virtual shelf research in Nfield.
Discover virtual shelves
ConceptSauce can provide a virtual shelf or virtual store for market research, which enables shoppers’ actions to be monitored and timed. Virtual shelves can easily be adjusted to carry out A/B testing with altered prices, added promotional banners, changed packaging or different product positioning. You can also find out what happens when you send shoppers on a mission to find a particular product.
When it comes to building your own shelves, ConceptSauce can do this for you, or you can do it yourself using their shelf builder.
Gaining insights through Nfield
Letting respondents loose on your virtual shelves is just the start.
Integrating Virtual Shelf in Nfield opens up a host of survey possibilities. Once the virtual shopping has been done, you can retrieve the lists of both the purchased items and the ones which were looked at but not chosen. Your Nfield questionnaire can ask why these decisions were made. In the case of sending shoppers to find specific products, you can see where they looked and how long it took.
How to integrate Virtual Shelf in Nfield
The following high-level steps outline what needs to be done to integrate Virtual Shelf in Nfield. You can, of course, get your technical teams to explain!
- Contact ConceptSauce for a demo, then set up your shelves.
- Refer to Academy #30 – Pause and resume surveys in Nfield Online to incorporate your survey transitions with ConceptSauce.
- Refer to Nfield External API to retrieve respondents’ shopping behavior. You’ll need to build a custom web page as an intermediary for using the ConceptSauce API and re-arrange the output to align with Nfield formatting.
Of course, you are very welcome to contact our helpdesk / salespeople for more information. Also, please feel free to share examples with us of how you’ve made this work.