Apply Product Availability
Apply Product Availability (Multi-store):
One of the assumptions the Market Simulator makes is that every Product you're asking Respondents to evaluate is equally likely to be available. There are times where that is not a good assumption. Some brands will occur in some stores and others will not.
Product Availability allows you to set up a structure that accounts for that.
Click the gear icon to access the Settings dialog.
Settings:
Apply Average Product Availability: This allows you to set the average availability of a product in the market.
Apply granular store information: This allows you to define individual stores, that can represent brick and mortar stores, or online stores, and define how likely respondents are to go to each of those stores, and which of your products is available at each of them.
The Aggregate Store Visit Probability values need to add up to 100%. If they don't, there will be a message at the bottom of the window (by the OK button, which is disabled) telling you the problem and the current sum of Probabilities.
Granular Store availability information can be setup with one set of percentages for the whole respondent group, or it can be defined per respondent. This will produce the best results, but takes a great deal more data and work to setup. These values can be configured manually, or imported from a file.
Simulate shopping trip count per respondent: This number determines how many shopping trips the software will simulate for each respondent.
When using Average Product Availability, each trip will determine which products are available, then select one for the respondent based on the Utility scores for that respondent.
When using Granular Store Information, for each trip a store will be randomly selected based on the percentage chance a respondent will go to that store, then the respondents selection will be limited by that store's defined available stock.
After running the set number of Shopping trips, the results will be averaged for that respondent.
