Blog · For businesses
A retailer pulse in a week
Brand teams plan trade schemes and distribution from dashboards. The retailer, the person who decides what goes on the shelf, is rarely asked directly, and almost never at scale.
The survey
Ask kirana and general-store owners whether stock is available, whether anything ran out last week, whether the trade-scheme margin arrived and how much, and how they rate their distributor.
- 24,600 retailer contacts; a sample of 5,200
- Stratified by district, store type and monthly sales band
- Interviews in Hindi, with open answers transcribed
What comes back
Each theme points to a decision: audit fill-rates on the routes where stock-outs concentrate, confirm scheme margins to retailers directly, and re-check the partial-payout stores within a month.
- 79% received the full ₹1,200 scheme margin; 21% a partial or missing payout
- A 16-point gap in distributor satisfaction between metro and rural routes
- Top themes: delayed scheme payouts, stock-outs, on-time delivery, smaller packs
An illustrative example: the survey, sample and results show what a typical study of this kind looks like on Shrota.