Guide · Shelf intelligence
How to check which dark stores list your product
How to check, store by store, which dark stores list your product, and how to tell a store that does not list it from one that has run out.
On a quick commerce app your product is not “in a city”. It is in some of that city’s dark stores and not in others, and each store’s range is decided separately. So the real question is store by store: which ones list it? Here is how to check, by hand and at scale, and where each way stops.
By hand
- Open the app without signing in.
- Set the delivery address to a point you want to test. The app then shows what the dark store serving that point carries.
- Open your category and look for your product, or search for it by name.
- Move the address to the next neighbourhood and repeat.
This works, and for five pincodes it is the right tool. Its limits show quickly:
- You do not know which store you read. Two addresses a kilometre apart can be served by one store or by two, so you can check the same store twice and miss the one beside it.
- You cannot cover a city. A large city has dozens of dark stores on one app.
- You cannot prove an absence. Not finding a product in a long category list is not the same as it not being there.
- It is one afternoon. A listing can be added or dropped the week after.
At scale
The same thing can be done for every dark store: visit each store’s delivery area, read its category lists, and keep what was on them. Shelf does that for 11,234 stores in 984 cities.
Reading at scale adds the thing a hand check cannot: knowing whether a list was read to the end. When a store’s category list is read to its last product, a product that is not on it is not listed there at that read.
Where an absence can be shown
On Blinkit and BigBasket, a store’s category list shows its last product, so “not listed in this store” is a statement Shelf makes, store by store.
Zepto, Swiggy Instamart and Flipkart Minutes show part of a list at a time, so there Shelf shows the stores where a product is listed, and never calls a store a gap.
What a useful answer looks like
Not “you are in 70% of stores”. A sentence with everything it stands on:
Of M stores on this app in this city, between these dates, N list your product, and K of the rest list a rival’s.
Then the list of those K stores, each with its city and area. That list is what gets a listing fixed: it is specific, it is dated, and the person reading it can check any row.