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Trade area analysis
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United Kingdom
Trade area analysis for UK stores and sites
Define primary and secondary trade areas from where visitors really come from, by postcode and travel time, for any UK store or candidate site.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with UK GDPR.
Trade area analysis is the American name for what UK retailers usually call catchment analysis: working out where a store's customers come from. Huq measures it for any UK address, by postcode, with drive-time and travel-time bands and a split between residents and visitors. Use it to define primary and secondary trade areas for your own stores, competitors' stores and sites you're considering.
Running a trade area analysis in Huq
The overview is a tour of the whole platform, so watch it with a trade area in mind. The catchment and postcode layers on the Explore map are where visitor postcodes appear, and the travel-time layer is what you would hold them against. Watch how areas are saved, too. A saved primary and secondary trade area can be tracked in a Project rather than rebuilt every quarter.
- Where visitor origins by postcode appear on the Explore map
- How travel-time bands compare with the measured trade area
- How to save trade areas and track them in a Project
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is trade area analysis?
Trade area analysis defines the geography a store draws its customers from. The term comes from US retail and real estate, and it is common in reports written for US parent companies. In the UK the same work is usually called catchment analysis. The method is identical.
Analysts often split the result into a primary trade area, the postcodes that supply most visits, and a secondary trade area further out. Older approaches set those boundaries with a radius or a drive-time polygon. Huq shows the postcodes visitors actually come from, so you can set the boundary where behaviour puts it: around motorway junctions, rail links, competing towns or the pull of a big shopping centre.
UK teams use trade area analysis to size new sites, check overlap between stores and brief landlords or investors who expect US-style terminology.
What's in your trade area analysis
01
Primary and secondary trade areas
See which postcodes send most visitors and draw the line between core and outer trade area.
02
Travel-time bands
Compare drive-time and travel-time bands in miles or minutes with the measured trade area.
03
Competitor trade area overlap
Use cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs to see shared visitors with nearby rivals.
04
Residents, visitors and demographics
Split residents from visitors and add age, gender and purchasing power for UK trade areas.
What a trade area analysis shows
Three views turn a list of postcodes into a trade area you can act on.
01
Visitor postcodes around the store
The catchment layer shows which postcodes send visitors, so the primary trade area is visible at a glance.
02
Trade area against travel time
Travel-time bands show where the measured trade area stops following distance and starts following roads, rail and rival towns.
03
Shared visitors with a competitor
Cross-visitation shows how many visitors your store shares with a nearby competitor or a second branch.
Trade area analysis for any UK address
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.
Why UK teams use Huq for trade area analysis
- 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 a trade area?
A trade area is the geography a store draws most of its customers from. It is the US term for what UK retailers usually call a catchment area. It is normally described as a set of postcodes or a travel-time band around the store.
What is the difference between a trade area and a catchment area?
In practice there is no difference. Trade area is the US retail and real estate term; catchment area is the usual UK term. Both describe where a store's customers come from. Huq's catchment analysis page covers the same work using UK terminology.
How do you define a primary trade area?
A common approach is to take the postcodes that together supply most of the store's visitors. The rest forms the secondary trade area. Huq shows which postcodes visitors actually come from, so the boundary follows real behaviour rather than a radius.
How often does Huq update trade area data?
Huq data refreshes weekly. That lets you see a trade area shift after a competitor opens, a store refit or a change in transport links. Each location also has a monthly PDF report with footfall trends, catchment, dayparts and dwell time.
Which locations does Huq cover?
Any address in the UK, from high street units to retail parks and sites you haven't opened yet, with no sensors needed. Huq publishes its accuracy country by country and reports an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall.
Can I get a free trade area analysis?
Yes. Use the form to list the stores or candidate sites you want to check. Huq will run a free analysis showing footfall and the measured trade area by postcode for those locations, so you can test it against what you already know.
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.