Top 5 Retail Audit Services / Companies for CPGs in 2024

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies engage with numerous retailers, both local and international. Managing effective and regular retail audits across such a vast network of stores can be daunting and costly. Retail audit services are essential for these CPGs to monitor their retail end, efficiently. These companies offer services like planogram audits and store checks, aiding CPG brands in enhancing their retail performance.

This article compares the top 5 retail audit service providers, analyzing them based on user reviews and offering criteria to help managers select the best option.

Top 5 retail audit companies on the market

This section highlights the top companies that offer retail audits as a service. We have compared them based on criteria explained later in the table.

Table 1. Comparison table based on market presence criteria

* Data gathered from B2B review platforms including G2, TrustRadius and Capterra.

Table 2. Comparison table based on features criteria

** Based on the companies’ websites

*** We incorporated companies that mention gathering retail audit data through surveys or offer custom audits on their websites.

Notes for the tables:

• Companies are ranked based on the total number of reviews
• Transparency statement: Vendors with links to their websites are sponsors of AIMultiple
• All companies offer mystery shopping, custom dashboards, and planogram audits.
• Companies with more than a 200,000 crowd size were included in this comparison.
• All services use a crowdsourcing model.

Criteria for selecting the right retail audit services

We have divided the selection criteria into 2 categories: market presence and features.

Market presence

1. Number of reviews: A higher number of reviews often indicates a stronger market presence for the retail audit service provider. This suggests that a wide array of clients, especially CPG companies, have leveraged the retail audit services, enabling prospective clients to gain a overview of the company’s performance in managing retail operations, ensuring regulatory compliance, and enhancing retail performance.

2. User rating: We calculated the average score from leading B2B review platforms for the audit services. A higher average rating denotes greater customer satisfaction and successful retail audits, reflecting positively on the quality of services provided. Interestingly, we’ve noted that an increase in the number of reviews sometimes correlates with a slight decrease in the average user rating, possibly due to the unique challenges and expectations associated with scaling retail auditing services.

Features

1. Crowd size: We selected companies with over 200,000 workers in its network. In evaluating the features of our retail audit service, the size of the field team or the global network of contributors within the company is crucial. A retail audit service provider with a larger crowd is better positioned to offer a wide array of insights, cover more locations, and provide actionable insights from a diverse range of stores and retail operations.

2. Retail surveys: Our retail audits include surveys conducted by our auditors when they visit various stores. This method is invaluable for CPGs aiming to integrate retailer insights and consumer behavior into their retail audit strategy, ensuring accuracy in product placement, pricing, and promotions.

3. Mystery shopping: Our mystery shopping program is a key feature where contributors visit stores disguised as regular shoppers. This approach is vital for retail audit service providers, as it allows CPGs to accurately evaluate retailers’ adherence to planograms, trade promotion plans, and assess the effectiveness of in-store marketing and visual merchandising.

4. Custom dashboards: We develop custom dashboards for CPGs to display the data collected from store audits, making it easier for clients to analyze retail audit data, make informed decisions, and tailor their retail operations and product positioning accordingly. These dashboards are designed to provide actionable insights, supported by predictive analytics, to address the unique challenges faced by businesses in maintaining product quality, inventory levels, and ensuring compliance across all retail locations.

Detailed analysis of the service providers

In this section, we provide some pros and cons of each of the services based on our analysis of several user reviews. The user reviews were analyzed from review platforms such as G2, Trustradius, and Capterra.

1. Clickworker

Based in Germany, Clickworker is a known player that offers paid crowdsourcing services, including retail audits. The company focuses on various industries, including e-commerce, fashion, retail, and marketing. Its retail and POS audit services include:

• Availability checks
• Price checks
• Planogram compliance checks
• Promotion checks
• Mystery shopping
• Competitor checks
• Display checks

Other services include AI data collection, data annotation, market research, survey participants, sentiment analysis, and others.

Pros and cons

1. Easy to use platform

Customer finds Clickworker’s platform easy to use and suggest potential users read profiles before choosing Clickworkers for their tasks.¹

2. Strong geographical reach

The reviewer achieved its business objectives ahead of schedule, within budget, and with high quality. Clickworker executed geography-related tasks with the added support of a dedicated project manager. The customer did not face any challenges while working with Clickworker.²

3. Large crowd and global reach

Clickworker has one of the largest crowd size and country reach among the other retail audit services. This can be beneficial for global CPGs, who need to monitor a lot of retailers in different countries.

2. Premise

Based in San Francisco, Premise also offers a platform for retail audits and other analytics tasks for CPGs through a crowdsourcing network. The company’s offerings include (As listed on its website) retail monitoring, audience analysis, and geospatial analytics.

Pros and cons

1. Lack of customer reviews

After examining various review platforms, we discovered only a single customer review. This scarcity of feedback may hinder potential customers from gaining a comprehensive understanding of the services offered before making a commitment.

2. good market research and predictive analytics

The customer liked its market research and predictive analytics capabilities.³

3- Large crowd and global reach

Premise has a large crowd as compared to the other services, such as BeMyEye, and has a large global reach.

3. BeMyEye

Based in London, England, BeMyEye also offers retail audits as a service through a crowdsourcing model. Along with CPGs, BeMyEye also offers services for retailers. Its other services include:

• Mystery shopping
• Price and promotion tracking
• Customer experience surveys
• Competitor benchmarking

Pros and cons

1. Lack of online presence

Our analysis of review platforms found that BeMyEye has no customer reviews, which can make it difficult for potential customers to evaluate its services

2. Smaller crowd and global reach

BeMyEye also has a smaller network of contributors as compared to competitors like Clickworker and premise. This can make it difficult for them to work for multinational customers.

4. Field Agent

Based in the US, Field Agent also offers retail audit solutions through a crowdsourcing network. Here is a list of its services as marketed on its website:

• Retail Audits
• Mystery shopping
• Mobile audits
• Merchandising checks
• Consumer insights
• On-shelf availability
• Competitive analysis
• Price checks

Pros and cons

1. Useful data with limitations

Real-time consumer access offers valuable insights but faces limitations due to a small marketing agent pool, hindering broad marketing campaigns.⁴

2. Incomplete mystery shopping tasks

A customer uses its mystery shopping service and faces that some participants left tasks incomplete.⁵

3. Small global reach

Field Agent covers fewer countries compared to its competitors. This limitation could potentially be a deal breaker for multinational or international CPG companies

5. Roamler

Roamler is another platform that offers crowdsourcing services, including retail audits. Based in the Netherlands, Roamler also offers the following services:

• Merchandising checks
• Mystery shopping
• Field marketing
• Retail execution

Pros and cons

1. Lack of market presence

The absence of customer reviews for Roamler could pose a challenge for companies considering its services, potentially impacting their trust in the platform.

2. Smaller crowd and global reach

The company also boasts one of the smallest networks of contributors compared to its competitors. Additionally, it covers fewer countries in comparison to alternatives such as Clickworker and Premise.

3. Features

While Roamler offers mystery shopping and custom dashboards, it does not offer survey-type data collection for retail audits.

FAQs for retail audit services

Further reading

• Retail Monitoring Guide & 5 Best Practices for CPGs
• Retail Audit Guide & Top 6 Best Practices
• Planogram Audit: Guide & Top 5 Service Providers

If you need further help in finding a vendor or have any questions, feel free to contact us:

External resources

• 1. Clickworker review of easy to use platform. G2. Accessed: 05/March/2024.
• 2. Clickworker review on geography. Capterra. Accessed: 05/March/2024.
• 3. Customer review of Premise. G2. Accessed: 05/March/2024.
• 4. Customer review of Field Agent. G2. Accessed: 05/March/2024.
• 5. Customer review of Field Agent. G2. Accessed: 05/March/2024.