For any retailer with a physical network, the same questions tend to come up time and again: where should we be, how many locations do we actually need, and does our network reflect where our customers are today?

Retail location planning gives you a structured way to answer those questions. It brings together geographic data, consumer insight, competitive context, and spatial modelling, so site decisions are based on what’s actually happening in the market.

GMAP Analytics supports this through location planning software, market-leading retail data, and hands-on retail location strategy consultancy. Whether you’re assessing a single site or reviewing an existing network, we give you the tools and expertise to act with confidence.

Who is retail location planning for?

GMAP's retail location planning tools and services are used by organisations that need to make strategic decisions about their store networks. They’re used across a wide range of retail contexts, including:

• Retail property and estates teams - assessing new sites and managing the performance of an existing estate
• Network and expansion planning teams - identifying where to grow and how quickly to do so
• Strategy and commercial teams - reviewing network performance and aligning location decisions with wider business objectives
• Marketing teams - understanding where target customers are concentrated and how well current locations are serving them
• Finance teams - building evidence-based cases for opening, relocating, or closing sites

Whether you’re running ten stores or several hundred, our retail location planning tools and consultancy are designed to support decisions around your network as it changes and develops.

What retail location planning helps you do

Retail doesn’t stand still. Customers change the way they shop, places rise and fall in popularity, and the competition keeps moving. The retailers who handle that best are the ones who have a clear, evidence-backed view of their network - and the right tools to keep it up to date. GMAP‘s retail network planning tools and software gives teams that clarity. In practice, that means being able to:



• See where your customers are actually coming from and how catchments behave across your network
• Compare each store against its true local market potential, not just company-wide averages
• Identify which locations are overperforming - and which aren’t
• Assess new sites thoroughly before you commit any investment
• Model the impact of opening, relocating, or closing stores on the wider network
• Identify gaps in coverage and untapped demand across a market
• Develop a location strategy that’s consistent and scalable

Our retail store location and site selection platform brings clarity to your current network position, giving teams a clear view of where to act next.

How GMAP delivers retail location planning

Retail location planning operates at multiple levels, from long-term network strategy to day-to-day site analysis. GMAP gives organisations the clarity to act at each stage.

Define your network strategy - Ideal Network Plans (INPs)

Ideal Network Plans provide an evidence-based view of how a retail network should be structured to support performance and coverage. Using a calibrated Spatial Interaction Model, GMAP consultants model demand, catchment size, and competitor performance to reflect how customers actually behave within a given market.

Working with GMAP, organisations can:

• Model how demand is distributed across a market
• Quantify how customers choose between competing locations
• Define optimal network size, spacing, and coverage
• Evaluate trade-offs between network efficiency and reach

Analyse sites and catchments - MVPLUS

MVPLUS gives retail teams direct access to location intelligence, enabling them to carry out site selection and location analysis as part of day-to-day decision-making.

With MVPLUS, teams can:

• Build and visualise catchments using drive-time and distance tools
• Layer customer, sales, and demographic data in one view
• Interrogate individual sites or groups of locations
• Export analysis into reports for internal decision-making

Model network-wide change – IMPACT

IMPACT shows how changes to a retail network affect overall performance, allowing teams to test decisions before committing to them.

With IMPACT, retailers can:

• Simulate the effect of openings, closures, and relocations
• Reallocate demand across the network based on changes
• Visualise trade shifts between locations
• Compare multiple scenarios under consistent assumptions

Understand the market context - RetailVision

GMAP’s RetailVision dataset provides the underlying market context behind retail location planning, giving a structured view of retail supply, demand, and geography.

RetailVision enables organisations to:

• Access a structured view of retail locations and centres
• Understand how retail destinations are organised and ranked
• Analyse demand flows between areas
• Benchmark locations using consistent market metrics

Alongside RetailVision, GMAP provides CAMEO geodemographic classifications (available across 36 countries) to give organisations a detailed consumer profile of any area alongside its retail context.

For over 30 years, GMAP has been helping retailers and organisations with physical networks across the UK and more than 60 countries. Clients work with us because we:

• Bring software and data into one team alongside consultancy, so analysis and strategy stay connected throughout.
• Support both day-to-day site decisions and long-term network planning within the same framework
• Use market-leading retail data to give a clearer, more complete view of performance, opportunity, and competition
• Apply sector expertise to interpret results in a practical, commercial context
• Deliver actionable outputs that are transparent and robust enough to stand up in board and investment discussions

Talk to us about retail location planning

Whether you’re building a site selection process from scratch, reviewing your current network, preparing a growth strategy, or trying to make sense of a changing retail landscape, GMAP Analytics can help.



Better location decisions come from understanding how your network really performs - not just how it looks on paper. GMAP brings that clarity into focus and turns it into decisions you can act on.

FAQs

What is retail location planning, and why does it matter?

Retail location planning is how retailers decide where to place stores and how their network should be structured using geographic, socio-demographic, and market evidence.

A strong site can build performance over the years, while a weak one can drag on results for just as long. Good planning reduces that uncertainty by grounding decisions in evidence rather than assumption or proximity.

What is the difference between retail site selection and retail network planning?

Site selection focuses on individual locations - whether a specific site is suitable for a store based on its catchment, customer profile, competition, and access. Network planning looks at the estate as a whole - how stores interact, where coverage is strong or weak, and how to grow without unnecessary overlap or cannibalisation. One focuses on the decision, the other on the system behind it.

Can GMAP support international retail location planning?

Yes. GMAP works across more than 60 countries with retailers expanding into new markets and organisations refining existing international networks.

Do I need technical expertise to use GMAP’s tools?

No, the tools are designed for business teams across property, strategy, marketing, and finance, and training and support are included. Once set up, teams can run analysis and scenarios independently, and the results are presented in clear, easy-to-read reports.

Can I use my own data with GMAP’s tools?

Yes. Client data can be combined with G-MAP’s market datasets to build a more complete view of performance and opportunity.