There are several trusted sources where you can find free and paid retail datasets to download and analyze. Some of the most commonly used sources include:
Kaggle: Kaggle is a very popular platform for data science competitions and projects where users can access thousands of public datasets for free. They have a wide selection of retail datasets ranging from transaction records to customer profiles. To access these datasets, you need to create a free Kaggle account. Then you can browse their retail category or use the search bar to find specific datasets. Most datasets can be downloaded directly from their page as CSV files.
Data.gov: As a government portal, Data.gov contains a large collection of datasets from different agencies that are all public domain. They have some interesting retail datasets primarily focused on things like census data, economic indicators, and consumer behavior analytics. To download from Data.gov, browse their catalog, search for relevant keywords like “retail sales” or categories like “economic” to find options. You can then click on individual datasets for metadata and download links.
Information Resources: This company curates retail datasets from various stores and chains then licenses them for use by businesses and researchers. Their datasets provide detailed point-of-sale transaction records, loyalty card purchase histories, and inventory/pricing files. Access requires registering for a free trial account on their site. Trial access is limited but lets you evaluate samples before paying licensing fees for full datasets.
Nielsen: As a leading market research firm, Nielsen has a wealth of consumer shopping behavior data captured via their Nielsen Homescan panel and store point-of-sale monitoring systems. Their retail datasets are only available for purchase through commercial licenses but provide very robust insights into categories like household item sales, store foot traffic patterns, and competitive brand/product analyses. Costs typically range from a few thousand to tens of thousands depending on scale and frequency of updates required.
Euromonitor: Similar to Nielsen, Euromonitor collects extensive market data on industries globally including retail sectors in different countries. They have pre-built retail market size and forecast datasets covering things like the size of the clothing, grocery, electronics retail industries over time by region. These detailed retail market reports and datasets need to be purchased but provide macro analyses of retail industry compositions and growth trends. Pricing is more affordable compared to Nielsen, starting at a few hundred dollars.
Store Layouts: This shopper behavior startup has crowdsourced floor maps and layouts of hundreds of major retail stores globally. Their open datasets contain anonymized store maps with metadata on departments, aisles, fixtures which researchers and retailers use for understanding consumer journeys and spatial analyses. Maps can be freely downloaded as image files with attribution given to the source.
IRI: Formerly known as Information Resources Inc, IRI is another leading market data provider collecting point-of-sale and survey-based information. Their retail datasets focus more on consumer-packaged goods like grocery, tobacco, OTC healthcare products. Dataset access requires commercial licensing but provides competitive sales, pricing, promotion, and household panel data for CPG categories.
US Census Bureau: The Bureau collects and publishes government economic reports providing insights like total retail sales by industry, inventory levels, e-commerce trends. Much of this macro retail indicators data is publicly available for free download as CSV files on their website without needing an account. Key datasets include Monthly & Annual Retail Trade reports along with quinquennial Economic Census results detailing sales by store type.
Individual Retail Chains: Some prominent big box and specialty retailers like Target, Walmart, Lowe’s, Home Depot also publicly share limited data subsets focusing on things like sales of particular product categories nationally or by region over time. These datasets have narrower scopes than Nielsen/IRI but provide a view of sales directly from major chains. They are freely available on the chains’ open data or “About Us” pages without registration.
There are also private retailers, marketplaces, e-commerce platforms where researchers can potentially gain access to transaction and user behavioral datasets for a fee by contacting their business development/partnerships teams. Getting approved typically requires clear use cases and agreeing to restrictive non-disclosure terms due to the sensitive commercial nature of the raw data.
While some of the most complete retail datasets need payment, there are also many sources for free public datasets to leverage without commercial licenses. Understanding the pros and cons of different data providers is important based on one’s specific analytical needs and research budgets when seeking retail datasets for projects. With the variety available, researchers should be able to find suitable options to power insightful retail sector analyses and model building.