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Retail competitor analysis
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United Kingdom
Retail competitor analysis for UK stores and centres
Benchmark footfall, catchments, dwell time and shared customers at your stores against rival stores, high streets and shopping centres across the UK.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with UK GDPR.
Retail competitor analysis with Huq puts your stores and your competitors' stores on the same measures. It covers store and location performance, not prices or ranges. For any UK address, from a high street unit to a retail park, you see weekly footfall, catchment by postcode, dwell time and visit frequency, plus local geo-spend via Experian. Find out which rivals are gaining and where your estate is ahead or behind.
See retail competitor analysis in Huq
The video is a platform overview, so watch it for the steps a benchmarking exercise relies on. Look at the retail centres and shopping centres layers, which show where competitors cluster around your stores, and at Projects, where a watch-list of rival UK stores can sit beside your own for monthly reporting to area managers or the board.
- Map a rival chain's UK stores with the brand locations layer.
- Compare footfall and dwell at your store and a competitor's over the same weeks.
- Track a set of competitors in a Project and report on them monthly.
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is retail competitor analysis?
Retail competitor analysis measures how rival stores and brands perform and what that means for yours. Online, that usually means prices and ranges. For a store estate, it means locations: which competitor sites are busy, which are growing and which share your customers.
In the UK the questions are specific. Is the new opening on the retail park drawing trade from your town centre store? Which fashion or food brands are winning in the shopping centres you trade in? Should you move to the stronger end of the high street? Rivals' sales data isn't available, and footfall counters only sit in stores you control.
Huq measures any UK address in the same way, so you can benchmark your stores against competitors with like-for-like footfall, catchment, dwell and frequency data. Huq doesn't see anyone's tills, yours or theirs; it measures visits.
What's in your retail competitor analysis
01
Competitor footfall trends
Weekly footfall at any rival store, with period-on-period change, so you can see who is gaining.
02
Rival estate mapping
The brand locations layer shows where a competitor trades across UK high streets, centres and retail parks.
03
Shared customers
Cross-visitation shows how many visitors your store shares with a competitor, for up to 10 location pairs.
04
Catchment and local spend
Compare postcode catchments, and geo-spend via Experian in the area around your stores and theirs.
What a retail competitor analysis shows
Three views take you from a rival's estate to a clear benchmark against yours.
01
Map the competition
Use the brand locations, retail centres and shopping centres layers to see which competitors trade near each of your stores.
02
Benchmark like for like
Compare footfall, dwell time and visit frequency at your stores and competitors' stores over the same weeks.
03
Track and report
Keep competitors in a Project, check changes weekly and share monthly PDF reports that show trends against regional and national benchmarks.
Competitor data for any UK high street, centre or retail park
Huq covers any address in the UK: high streets, shopping centres, retail parks, competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened yet. No counters, sensors or cameras needed.
Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year, and data refreshes weekly.
How it works
Step 1
Tell us your locations
Add up to five addresses in the form. Your own stores, candidate sites or competitors.
Step 2
We run the analysis
Our team maps each location from observed visitor data.
Step 3
We walk you through it
A short call to take you through what the data shows and what it means for you.
Retail benchmarking: why UK teams use Huq
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall.
- JD Sports, a UK retailer, got 25% more precise catchment analysis and 18% lower new-store location risk.
- Ripon BID saw footfall up 164% year on year.
- Trusted by 300+ organisations across 35 markets, including the global insights, research and location intelligence teams at Nike, Adidas, JD Sports and Samsung.
huq's platform gave us valuable data to support a key decision on potential new sites.
Dan Brogden
National Sales Manager, Puccinos
Who it's for
01
Retail chains of any size
From five-store retailers planning their next site to global brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail property owners
Show centre performance, support leasing and get the tenant mix right, for landlords, asset managers and brokers.
03
Investors and private equity
Check how retail brands and assets actually perform before you buy, and monitor them after.
Everything Huq measures, in one platform
- Footfall: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily footfall, trends, period-on-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Catchment and travel time: catchment by postcodes, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power.
- Behaviour: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Footfall density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping centre and retail centre types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category at any UK location, via Experian.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, catchment, shopping centres, retail centres, brand locations, industries and postcodes), White Space Analysis, and Projects for monitoring many locations and reporting to stakeholders.
- Delivery: the platform, CSV or Excel exports, monthly PDF location reports, and data feeds as Parquet and CSV files into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets.
- Cadence: data refreshes weekly.
Frequently asked questions
What is retail competitor analysis?
It's the process of measuring how competing stores and brands perform, so you can decide where to open, relocate or invest. For UK store estates, the most useful measures are footfall, catchment, dwell time and shared customers, compared like for like between your stores and your rivals'.
What is retail benchmarking?
Retail benchmarking compares a store's performance with a reference point: your other stores, competitors, the local high street or regional and national averages. Huq's monthly PDF location reports show trends against regional and national benchmarks, and the platform lets you add any competitor store as a comparison.
How do I get competitive intelligence on rival stores?
Mystery shopping and price checks tell you about the offer. For performance, you need data that covers sites you don't own. Huq works on any UK address with no hardware, so you can follow a rival's footfall, dwell time and catchment alongside your own.
What is included in a free retail competitor analysis?
Name a handful of your stores and the competitors you watch most closely. We'll compare footfall trends, catchments, dwell time and shared visitors for those locations, so you can judge the data on your own estate. It's free and there's no obligation.
How often is competitor data updated?
Huq data refreshes weekly, so a new competitor opening or closure shows up in the trend within weeks. You can work in the platform, export to CSV or Excel, receive monthly PDF location reports, or take data feeds as Parquet or CSV files into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Does Huq cover all UK locations?
Yes, any address in the UK: high streets, town centres, shopping centres and retail parks, including competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened. Huq publishes its accuracy by country, with an 18.7% median error in Great Britain, and validates more than 1,000 locations in each market twice a year.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoAbout Huq
Huq is a location intelligence company. We turn anonymised mobile location data into footfall, catchment and visitor insight for any place, so retailers, property owners and local authorities can make decisions on evidence.
See how your locations really perform
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.