Retail Store Testing

Question

I am an analyst who is new to retail store testing (for example: customer response to a store new layout or a new product or process in one or 2 stores).

Any suggestions for a good book/blog/any source where I could learn about this. The challenges I see are - the sample size is usually one or 2 stores for the test so how do you do statistically significant testing with such a small sample; test stores or control stores are matched 1-1 but often not selected randomly. Any guidance in learning about the data science in this area is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

"The New Science of Retailing: How Analytics are Transforming the Supply", Book by Ananth Raman and Marshall Fisher has some very good information of data science applied to Retail. Although, they don't address your case directly, they do have a chapter on store level execution that might help, and another chapter on assortment planning which might have relevant information.

Answer 2

I think your confusion is that you only have two stores, but you might have more than 2 data points being generated from those two stores. For example, you might be interested in how much individual customers spend at the two stores. You can look at receipt totals from the stores. Then you would just run an independent t-test on the receipt totals data, because you have essentially two groups. Group A comes from store A's Reciepts and Group B comes from store B's receipts.

Using this methodology you could look at any number of response variables.