Accompanied Shopping Trips (AST’s)

Accompanied Shopping Trips (ASTs) are one of the most effective ways of understanding consumer buying behaviour – also known as Accompanied Shops or Depths. Accompanied Shopping trips are similar to shadowing – although the moderator has a more active role here to glean insights into the respondent’s behaviours and mental processes.

How Accompanied Shopping Trips Work?

Respondents are pre-recruited and invited to spend a specified amount of time (e.g 45 minutes to an hour) walking around a store as if they were carrying out their routine shopping or purchasing several specified products.

A researcher accompanies the respondent and conducts the in-depth interview as they tour the store. There are usually 15 minutes or so to spare at the end, where the Researcher and respondent can sit down and discuss other topics from the topic guide, which contains a list of themes/questions to be covered during the process.

ASTs can also be used to visit a competitor’s store and make comparisons between the two. As well as accompanied shopping trips, we can also carry out ”Shopper Intercepts”.

The obvious advantage of this approach is that the researcher can see first-hand how they shop, the types of products the respondent is drawn to, the type of questions they may ask staff or problems they encounter, what they think of the in-store display, promotions and environment, etc.

All these insights provide new information that then allows the researcher to ask deeper and more meaningful questions, which would be difficult to capture without seeing things firsthand.

Typically, accompanied shops, as they are sometimes known, are used by retailers and brand owners to capture customer experience – likes, dislikes, frustrations, etc., store layout, category positioning, awareness, in-store decision-making processes, competitor intelligence, etc. They are conducted in most physical stores from supermarkets such as Tesco to luxury fashion houses.

Online Accompanied Shopping Trips (Accompanied Surfs)

Increasingly, retailers and brand owners are looking at ways in which online shops/websites can be optimised for improved customer experience and for a positive return in terms of sales. Using Accompanied surfs or Usability Testing, we monitor, observe and use cutting-edge eye-tracking techniques to understand how consumers and B2B audiences use websites, and what improvements might be required.