Guide · Shelf intelligence
What to bring to an app’s category manager
The evidence that gets a listing fixed: a dated store list, the stores it is out of, and the rival on the same shelf.
The person who decides which dark stores carry your product sees a great many brands. “We are under-listed in the South” gives them nothing to do. A list of stores does. This is what to put in front of an app’s category team, and what to leave out.
One app, one page
Never mix apps. The team you are meeting runs one of them, and a number that adds Blinkit to Zepto to anything else is a number nobody in the room owns. Everything below is for a single app.
The four things worth bringing
1. The store list
Every dark store where a rival in your category is on the shelf and you are not, with the city and the area of each. Not a percentage. A list, because a list can be worked through row by row and a percentage can only be argued with.
2. What the list is out of
“Listed in 180 of 240 stores, between these dates.” The denominator tells them how much of the network the list covers, and the dates tell them how old it is. Without both, the first question in the meeting is “out of how many?” and the second is “as of when?”.
3. Listed and out of stock, kept apart
Stores that do not carry you are a range question for this team. Stores that carry you and have run out are a supply question, often for someone else. Bring them as two lists. See not listed or out of stock.
4. The rival on the same shelf
The argument for a listing is rarely “please list us”. It is “this store already sells this category, and the shopper there is buying the other brand”. A rival’s presence, store by store, makes that case without an adjective.
What helps, if you have it
- Your place in search on the category’s plain keywords, on that app.
- Your price beside the rival’s on the same pack size, on that app.
- New stores. Stores that are new on your list of the app’s stores and do not carry you yet.
What to leave out
- Anything you cannot source. If a row is challenged and you cannot say when and how it was read, the whole page loses.
- An absence you could not prove. “We did not see ourselves there” is not “we are not there”. Only stores whose whole shelf was seen belong on a gap list.
- A rival’s sales. Nobody outside the app has them.
- Old readings without a date. A list from six weeks ago may already be half fixed.
After the meeting
Keep the list. At the next read, the same stores are either fixed or not, and that is the follow-up: “of the 60 stores we raised, 41 list us now”. A conversation that comes back with a count is one the other side takes seriously the next time.