AggData Stores vs Distributors

AggData’s core product is a collection of business locations. Typically, those are brick & mortar stores owned by whatever company is being tracked. However, we also collect a different type of physical location: the distributor.

What is a distributor?

A distributor location in AggData is different than you may see in other business contexts. These are not warehouses or vendors or some other type of business along the logistics chain. When collecting information about the physical locations associated with a company, “stores” are the locations that are owned or branded by the company itself, whereas “distributors” are third-party locations where a company’s product or service is provided. For example, Timberland Shoes owns several retail and outlet locations, but they also sell their shoes in many other retailers of different sizes. On their website, they list both types of locations:

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Note that the first location in the search results is a Timberland-owned outlet store, and is clearly marked as such. However, the rest of the results are distributor locations, starting with a “Rack Room Shoes” location, a store which while clearly not owned by Timberland, does sell Timberland-branded shoes.

Distributors don’t have to be places where a product is sold, they can also be where a company’s service is provided. Some examples of service distributors are:

• Cell phone stores that provide a specific company’s service plan

• Hospitals that fall within a health network

• Grocery stores that offer check-cashing or other money services

• Medical offices that provide a specific type of treatment

• Repair shops that fall within a certain auto-supplier’s network

As you can see, there are many circumstances where third-party locations are involved with a company, and where the information is still useful to track and provide as a representation of the company’s physical presence.

Note: Due to high variability of distributor only locators, verification of distributor count is a reflection of the day of collection.

How do I tell the difference between a store and a distributor location?

Let’s continue with the Timberland example. Here are some example data records in the Timberland file (click to expand):

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One can clearly see the two Timberland-owned stores (“Timberland Outlet Store”); the rest are distributors, whether that means another large chains (Foot Locker, DSW, Sears) or a local chain/mom & pop location (Takkens Comfort Shoes, J L Powell Clothing).

The two important fields to look at are store_name and distributor_name. In short, the way to tell if a location is a distributor is if it has a non-empty value in the distributor_name column. If there is a value in the store_name column, or if both columns are blank (or don’t exist), that means the location is a store. There will be many cases where the distributor_name column doesn’t exist, which means there are zero distributor locations in that dataset, and there are some cases where a store_name field doesn’t exist, only a distributor_name column, which means that every location is a distributor (as long as a value exists in each distributor_name field).

How much of the library is distributor locations?

From a pure record-count perspective, distributor locations are fairly overrepresented. This is because it is much easier for a company to have many thousands of distributor locations, since these are locations that already exist outside of the company, than it is to have many thousands of store locations. Also, one physical store maybe a distributor to several other lists; that Rack Room Shoes likely distributes Nike and Reebok and Adidas and more, aside from being a Timberland distributor. So, while distributors exist in only around 10% of the lists in the AggData Premium library, by pure record count, close to 50% of the locations in the library are distributor locations.

How can I filter out distributors in my data pulls?

We understand that it may not be useful to include distributor locations in your analysis of the datasets you get from AggData, so we have provided several ways to filter out these locations, depending on your method of obtaining the data. The easiest method is to simply filter out any location that has a value in the distributor_name column in your downloaded data, but we also have ways to prevent those locations from existing in your download in the first place.

Data Browser

In the Data Browser, you can quickly remove any entries that belong to a distributor category in the filter options:

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Note that this will filter out full lists, whether they have partial store locations or not.

List Builder

In any List Builder created, there is a specific filter to Exclude Distributors:

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This removes any individual location that is a distributor from the resulting dataset.

API

If you would like to exclude distributors from your /location API calls, simply add the following parameter:

filter=!distributor_name:*

For example, the following call would pull all Timberland Shoes locations that are not distributors:

See our API Documentation for more details on location filtering.

Distributor Verification Process