Affinity Unveils Larger, More Stable US Retail Monitor

Consumer purchase insights company Affinity Solutions has enhanced its CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor dataset, expanding the sample to represent 50% of the US population and promising a more representative and consistent view of retail spend across the nation.

Affinity, headquartered in New York, uses fully permissioned data from hundreds of millions of daily credit and debit card transactions across the US and UK, to provide an understanding of consumer purchasing behavior. Since its launch in November 2023, the Retail Monitor has measured monthly and annual changes in US retail sales: Affinity says it has now expanded the dataset underlying the Retail Monitor from 26 million to 120 million annual cards, and added a new methodology designed to create a more consistent and representative view month by month. The new approach projects the larger sample to US demographic benchmarks, to represent the country's c.267 million adults. The bigger sample also means the Monitor can report retail sales by sector, alongside the percentage changes it has published since launch.

The updated methodology also introduces a Bayesian calibration approach using historical data from the Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MRTS) - this anchors and improves the consistency of the Retail Monitor's data, reducing the potential impact of changes in panel composition.

CEO Jonathan Silver (pictured) says of the upgrades: 'Consumer behavior is changing quickly, and marketers need a clear, dependable view of where spend is moving and why. By combining substantially greater scale with stronger demographic representation, we're making Retail Monitor an even more powerful resource for understanding the US consumer and the retail economy, which can then be used to better inform marketing efforts.'

Web site: www.affinitysolutions.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.