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Cannibalization analysis
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United States
Cannibalization analysis for your US store network
See how many visitors a new or planned store shares with your existing stores, and how visits shift after it opens. Free overlap check for one site.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with the CCPA and applicable US state privacy laws.
Cannibalization analysis tells you how much of a new store's traffic comes from customers your other stores already had. Huq measures it with visitors, not distance rings. Cross-visitation compares up to 10 location pairs at once, showing shared and unique visitors between a candidate site and your nearby stores. After an opening, weekly data shows whether visits at sister stores dropped, held or grew.
See how cannibalization analysis works in Huq
The overview video shows how locations are selected on the Huq Explore map, how their foot traffic and catchments appear, and how sites are grouped in Projects. For cannibalization analysis, picture a planned site and your nearest stores as one Project, then compare shared visitors, catchments and weekly visits before and after the opening.
- Cross-visitation: shared and unique visitors for up to 10 location pairs, showing which stores a new site would draw from.
- Catchment and drive time: see where each store's visitors live and how far they really travel, beyond straight-line distance.
- Period-on-period trends: track sister store visits after an opening against the same weeks last year.
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is cannibalization analysis?
Cannibalization analysis measures how much a new store takes from your existing stores rather than adding new customers. In retail and restaurants it is also called sales transfer or sister store impact. Some transfer is normal. The question is whether the new location adds enough net new business to justify it.
The usual shortcut is to draw a radius around each store and measure where the circles overlap. But customers don't follow circles. People shop near work, along commutes and on weekend trips, so two stores a few miles apart can share many visitors or almost none.
A better measure is customer overlap: how many people visit both locations. Huq's cross-visitation shows it, alongside catchment and drive time for each store. Pair it with your sales data, or load Huq's data feeds into your own models, to estimate transfer in dollars. Product cannibalization is a separate topic.
What's in your cannibalization analysis
01
Cross-visitation matrix
Shared and unique visitors for up to 10 location pairs in one view, including planned sites against your existing stores.
02
Catchment and drive time overlap
Where each store's visitors come from and how far they travel, showing the areas two locations both draw on.
03
Visit shifts after opening
Weekly foot traffic at sister stores before and after a new opening, with year-over-year comparison to strip out seasonality.
04
Benchmarking against competitors
Compare your stores' visit trends with nearby competitors to tell cannibalization apart from a wider market change.
What a cannibalization analysis shows
A sample overlap check for one new opening and its nearest sister stores.
01
Shared vs unique visitors by store pair
Each cell shows the share of one store's visitors who also visit another location. High shared values flag the pairs most exposed to cannibalization.
02
Sister store visits before and after opening
Weekly visits at nearby stores in the months around an opening, set against the same weeks last year so seasonal swings don't distort the result.
03
Overlapping catchments on the map
Where visitors to each store come from, drawn from measured visits. Overlap often follows commute routes rather than straight-line distance.
Cannibalization analysis for any US store network
Huq covers any address in the United States: shopping centers, main streets, downtowns, strip malls, 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 network planners use Huq for cannibalization analysis
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: a 19.5% median error across published markets, against a 30% healthy threshold.
- Huq's customers give it an NPS of 42.
- Trusted by 300+ organizations 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 national brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail real estate owners
Show shopping center 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
- Foot traffic: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily foot traffic, trends, period-over-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Trade area and travel time: trade areas by ZIP code, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power, available in selected markets.
- Behavior: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Foot traffic density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping center and retail center types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category, available in selected markets.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, trade areas, shopping centers, retail centers, brand locations, industries and ZIP codes), 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 cannibalization in business?
Cannibalization is when a company's new store or product takes sales from its existing ones instead of winning new customers. Product cannibalization happens within a range. Location cannibalization happens when a new store draws customers from your nearby stores. Huq measures the location kind, using shared and unique visitors between your sites.
How do you calculate cannibalization?
The cannibalization rate is the share of a new store's sales that previously went to your existing stores. Huq gives you the visitor side: shared visitors between locations and changes in sister store visits after opening. Combine that with your own sales data to estimate transfer in dollars.
How do you avoid cannibalization?
By measuring overlap before they open, not by relying on a fixed distance rule. Overlap depends on where people live and work and the routes they use, so two stores a short drive apart may share few visitors while two further apart share many. Huq's cross-visitation shows shared visitors for up to 10 location pairs at once.
How do you detect cannibalization?
Watch your sister stores' visits after a nearby opening and compare them with the same weeks last year. A drop at nearby stores that isn't matched by competitors or the wider market points to cannibalization. Huq data updates weekly, with 12 months of cross-visitation trend, so you can spot a shift early and judge the longer-term effect.
What's in the free cannibalization analysis?
We run an overlap check between one candidate site or recent opening and up to three of your nearest stores. You get shared and unique visitor shares for each pair, a catchment map and, for a recent opening, weekly visit trends at the sister stores.
Can Huq measure overlap between any US stores?
Yes. Huq measures foot traffic across the US and in 35 markets worldwide, with no sensors, cameras or hardware, and manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each market twice a year. You can test a prospective site against your existing network, or compare your stores with franchisee and competitor locations.
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.
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Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.