Mobile data, foot traffic, and visit trends have become foundational to how retailers understand performance, competition, and opportunity.
Within Competitive Insights, these capabilities already provide a clear view of where customers go, trade areas, and how markets evolve over time.
The new Cross Shop dashboard builds on that foundation – adding a new layer of visibility into how customers engage across brands within those same markets.
Extending from visits to behavior
Understanding where customers visit is critical. But in many cases, the next question naturally follows:
Where else are those same customers going?
Cross Shop is designed to answer that question.
By analyzing anonymized mobility data, Cross Shop identifies when the same customers visit multiple brands within a market – revealing patterns of shared audience behavior across locations and chains.
This allows teams to move from understanding visitation to understanding customer interaction across the competitive landscape.
How Cross Shop works
At a high level, Cross Shop looks at shared device activity across locations.
When the same devices are observed visiting multiple brands, those patterns are aggregated to show:
- Which brands share customers
- How frequently customers overlap
- How behavior varies across markets and categories
The Cross Shop dashboard builds on this by applying a behavioral model that helps distinguish between:
- Proximity-driven overlap, where customers visit nearby locations out of convenience
- Intentional cross-shopping, where customers actively choose multiple brands
This distinction is key to understanding not just where overlap exists, but what it actually means.
From site-level insight to market-level understanding
Cross Shop is available in two complementary ways within Competitive Insights.
At the site level, users can quickly assess cross-shop activity for an individual location – seeing which nearby stores share customers, the scale of that overlap, and how distance plays a role.
At the strategic level, the Cross Shop dashboard expands that view to the brand and market level. Instead of focusing on individual sites, users can analyze how a brand’s customers interact with competitors across an entire market.
Together, these views provide both immediate operational insight and broader strategic context—without leaving the Competitive Insights workflow.
What this enables in practice
Adding this behavioral layer unlocks a new set of practical applications across teams.
- Marketing teams can identify brands with strong audience overlap, helping guide partnership strategies, co-marketing opportunities, and targeted promotions based on real customer behavior.
- Strategy teams can compare cross-shopping patterns across markets to understand how competitive dynamics shift by geography – informing pricing, positioning, and product decisions.
- Real estate teams can incorporate cross-shop insights into site selection and co-tenancy decisions, identifying where complementary brands drive shared demand and where competitive pressure may impact performance.
In each case, Cross Shop enhances existing workflows – providing additional context that supports more informed decisions.
Integrated into the way you already work
Cross Shop is not a standalone dataset or external report.
It’s fully integrated within Competitive Insights and the broader KLI platform, meaning these behavioral insights can be used alongside trade areas, forecasting, demographics, and site analysis.
This allows teams to connect customer behavior directly to decision-making, rather than treating it as a separate analysis step.
Explore Cross Shop within Competitive Insights
Cross Shop Dashboards are now available as part of Competitive Insights.
If you’re already using CI, you can start exploring cross-shop behavior today to add a new dimension to your analysis.
If you’re not yet using Competitive Insights, request a demo to see how Cross Shop builds on existing mobility data to support more informed location and competitive strategy.
