Accompanied Shopping Trips Explained

Accompanied Shopping Trips (ASTs) are among the most effective ways to understand consumer buying behaviour – also known as Accompanied Shops or Depths. Accompanied Shopping trips are a qualitative research method and 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 shopping for their routine purchases 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, when the Researcher and respondent can sit down and discuss other topics from the topic guide, which lists themes and questions to be covered during the process.

ASTs can also be used to visit a competitor’s store and compare the two. In addition to accompanying shopping trips, we can also carry out ”Shopper Intercepts” along with focus groups, individual depth interviews and eye-tracking studies.

The obvious advantage of this approach is that the researcher can see firsthand how they shop, the types of products the respondent is drawn to, the questions they may ask staff, the problems they encounter, and their views on the in-store display, promotions, and environment.

All these insights provide new information, enabling the researcher to ask deeper, more meaningful questions that 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 for ways to optimise online shops and websites to improve the customer experience and drive positive sales returns. Using observational research or accompanied trips, we monitor and employ cutting-edge eye-tracking techniques to understand how consumers and B2B audiences use websites and identify any required improvements.