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Pricing & Promotions Testing

Test pricing and promotions to drive shopper impact & sales uplift

Simulate
Pricing
Strategies

Test
Promotional
Displays

Understand
Response
Drivers

The Problem

In-market testing can deliver valuable, real-world insight but it’s a high-risk strategy. Physical changes require significant investment, and results from one store don’t always translate to others.

An underperforming setup means lost revenue and, more importantly, lost customer goodwill. Even worse, a store setup that looks promising locally can lead to a costly national rollout that fails to replicate the success. Conversely, one that’s abandoned after performing poorly in the test-store could have been a winner in others. (Retailers are big on FOMO.)

The problem is, without pre-testing, you’re relying on assumptions, and a wrong assumption based on skewed data can erode margins fast.

The Solution

Fortunately, there’s a way to avoid the pain, risk, and anxiety of physical testing - go virtual. By simulating multiple shelf setups across geographic regions before committing a single change in-store, you can test quickly, cost-effectively, and with accurate, repeatable results.

Buzz 3D lets you model price points, pack sizes, and promotional tactics on shelves of various styles, lengths, and heights - all rendered with lifelike realism and fully interactive. Shoppers can browse, pick up products, and add them to a basket just as they would in a physical store. Capture reactions, compare versions side by side, and optimise your approach before rollout, giving you the confidence that your intended audience will welcome your concepts.

Core Benefits

  • Build and launch tests fast - no physical store changes required

  • Test pricing sensitivity without market risk (with promo-coloured price tags & “old price” strike-throughs)

  • Compare pricing and promotional performance by product, segment, or shopper group

  • Track engagement, selection, and conversion behaviour for each variant

  • Run A/B/C tests across multiple price points, pack sizes, or promotional formats

  • Identify the offers and designs that perform best for different shopper segments

Use Cases

  • Introduce new pricing tiers with measurable shopper response

  • Test value packs and multi-buy offers before launch

  • Evaluate promotion compliance and effectiveness across locations

  • Optimise shelf promotions for maximum impact across channels

  • Trial limited-time offers or seasonal promotions without market risk (highlighted promo pricing on tags)

  • Compare regional or demographic-specific price strategies before rollout

Conclusion

Buzz 3D provides a virtual solution for testing pricing and promotional strategies with real shoppers quickly, cost-effectively, and without the risks of in-store trials. No guesswork. No wasted spend. Just shopper-validated results you can roll out with confidence.

Now see it in action with our free demo - just mousewheel / pinch to zoom, drag to pan your view, tap a product to select, or the cart button to view what you’ve added, then go through checkout to see your metrics.

Talk About Pricing & Promotions?

Let’s discuss testing your pricing strategies and promotions to find the offers that resonate most with your shoppers.

FAQs

  • Pricing & Promotions Testing allows retailers and brands to trial different price points, pack sizes, and promotional offers in a safe, virtual environment before making costly in-store changes. Getting pricing or promotions wrong can erode margins, damage customer trust, or waste valuable marketing spend — so it’s vital to validate ideas with real shoppers first.

    Buzz 3D connects proposed pricing and promotional setups to a live survey, enabling feedback from large numbers of respondents. Unlike traditional surveys, our interactive technology lets participants browse and shop directly from the virtual shelf, seeing promotional tags, strike-throughs, and highlighted discounts just as they would in-store. This boosts engagement and delivers results that closely reflect real-world shopper behaviour.

  • Getting pricing or promotions wrong in even one store can mean lost sales, reduced margins, and wasted marketing investment. Multiply that across dozens or hundreds of stores, and the financial impact can be significant. Pricing & Promotions Testing eliminates this risk by providing a safe, cost-effective, and flexible way to trial different price points and promotional mechanics before rolling them out.

    Retailers and brands can compare shopper responses to multiple price tiers, multi-buy offers, or seasonal promotions, and then choose the strategies that deliver the strongest uplift. This ensures optimised margins, higher shopper engagement, and stronger sales performance without the cost and risk of in-store trial and error.

  • Pricing & Promotions Testing can be launched quickly — in many cases, a shelf setup with different price points and promotional tags can be built in minutes, depending on the quality and completeness of the data provided. Once created, it’s published to our secure servers and ready to embed directly into your survey platform.

    You can run the test for as long as needed to reach your target respondent quota. As soon as the study closes, you’ll receive complete, ready-to-analyse data on shopper responses to each pricing and promotional strategy — delivering actionable insights in days rather than weeks.

  • Pricing & Promotions Testing with Buzz 3D captures a detailed set of shopper behaviour metrics and product interaction data, including:

    Session details: User ID, study name, shelf type (shopping session or findability), scenario number (for tracking multiple sessions per respondent), date and time.

    Product interaction: Add-to-cart status, pick-up order, product descriptions, EAN, dwell time, and respondent ID.

    Pricing & promotions impact: Response to promotional tags, colour-coded discounts, strike-throughs of old prices, and basket-level comparisons across price points or promotional formats.

    All results are compiled into a summary sheet for quick, easy analysis. This level of detail shows not just what shoppers buy, but how they react to different prices and promotions — giving you actionable insights to protect margins and maximise response before rolling out in-store.

  • The maximum shelf length we can support is 11 metres (around 36 feet). This is more than enough for testing most pricing and promotional scenarios — from a single bay with a few highlighted offers to a full aisle featuring multiple tiers, value packs, or seasonal promotions.

    For unique projects with longer aisles or more complex promotional setups, please get in touch to discuss how we can support extended shelf lengths.

  • Yes. Pricing & Promotions Tests can be deployed in multiple languages and currencies, making it easy to run studies across different regions or shopper groups.

    Currently supported languages include Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

    For pricing, we support the main international currency symbols: £ (GBP), $ (US and Brazilian Dollar), € (Euro), ¥ (Chinese Yuan / Japanese Yen).

    Prices are displayed exactly as provided in your source data, and promotional formatting — such as colour-coded tags and strike-throughs — adapts seamlessly to each market.

    This flexibility allows you to compare shopper response to the same promotion across countries or to test region-specific pricing strategies without rebuilding the shelf from scratch.

  • Yes. As part of Pricing & Promotions Testing, you can run product findability tasks by asking respondents to locate specific items on the shelf. This not only shows how easily shoppers can spot key products, but also how well promotional pricing or highlighted offers draw attention.

    The results help you assess the effectiveness of packaging and promo visibility, compare different shelf setups, and ensure your priority lines and featured promotions stand out in real-world retail settings.

  • Yes. Our interactive Pricing & Promotions Testing includes a fully interactive shelf where respondents can:

    • Zoom in or out

    • Pan around the display

    • View realistic price tags, including highlighted promotional pricing and strike-throughs

    • Select products

    • Add or remove items from their basket

    Every interaction is tracked — from basket changes to dwell time — ensuring Buzz 3D captures natural shopper behaviour with exceptional accuracy. This rich behavioural data shows not only how shoppers navigate a shelf, but also how pricing and promotional cues influence their decisions, mirroring real-world shopping behaviour.

  • Yes. Our interactive planogram testing supports realistic price tags that display list price, sale price, and a detailed product description. This ensures respondents see the same pricing cues they would in-store, allowing you to test how pricing strategies, promotions, and product information impact shopper choices.

  • Absolutely. Simulating a real-world shelf and capturing how shoppers interact with products is a core feature of our interactive Pricing & Promotions Testing. Respondents can pick up items, view their details, add them to a basket, and remove them at any time during their session — just as they would in-store.

    This realistic interaction, combined with visible pricing and promotional cues, helps ensure results closely reflect genuine shopper behaviour and purchase decisions.

  • Because Buzz 3D’s Pricing & Promotions Testing is a lightweight, web-based technology, we can support hundreds of respondents in a single study without performance issues. For most clients, a sample size of around 100–150 respondents per shelf setup provides enough data for reliable results while accounting for outliers.

    Larger studies are also supported for projects that require additional statistical confidence, such as testing multiple price tiers or promotional mechanics across different shopper segments.

  • Yes. Respondent revisits are included in the initial cost of our Pricing & Promotions Testing. Participants can return to the same shelf as many times as needed, with every interaction recorded. Each revisit is timestamped and logged, allowing you to track behavioural changes over time — for example, how repeated exposure to a discount or promotion influences choice.

    All results are delivered in a single, easy-to-analyse dataset at the end of the study.

  • Buzz 3D’s Pricing & Promotions Testing technology has been trusted by some of the world’s largest brands, consistently correlating with their historical sales data. Independent academic studies — conducted years ago using earlier, less advanced shelf simulation tools — demonstrated a 92% alignment between online shelf testing and real-world shopper behaviour.

    These findings remain highly relevant today. Buzz 3D’s advanced, automated platform builds on this foundation by enabling fast, cost-effective testing of pricing and promotional strategies with less human intervention than any other solution on the market.

  • Yes. For ad hoc clients purchasing our minimum 5-shelf Pricing & Promotions Testing package, we provide ready-to-use generic templates. Subscription clients who purchase larger volume packages receive additional benefits, including:

    • Automated template population from existing pricing or planogram back-end systems

    • Access to our live, secure drop folder where individual respondent data records are posted in real time

    This real-time data feed enables survey branching as respondents react to specific price points or promotional offers, allowing you to capture richer behavioural insights and adapt the respondent journey dynamically.