You don't need to take SlottedAI's word for it. Shelf position and visibility have been studied directly, with real shoppers, for years. Here's what that research actually shows, and why it's the foundation this tool is built on.
No spreadsheet. No planogram software. Just walking the aisle with a notepad or a phone, scribbling down what seems to be moving, and rearranging things based on a hunch, squeezed in between customers, usually more than once.
Whatever that scribbled note looks like, however rough, however messy, SlottedAI can still read it.
The most direct evidence comes from a peer-reviewed study that used real eye-tracking equipment to watch how shoppers actually looked at products on a shelf, not just what they said afterward in a survey.
Using an eye-tracking experiment, the researchers found that how many facings a product had on the shelf strongly affected how favorably shoppers evaluated it, and that this effect worked entirely through visual attention. In plain terms: more visible placement earned more looks, and more looks earned a better impression of the product. The effect was strongest for shoppers who already bought the brand regularly, for lower-market-share brands trying to compete for attention, and for younger, more highly educated shoppers.
That's the mechanism SlottedAI's optimizer is built around, moving your best performers into the positions that earn the most attention, and using your own real sales numbers, not a guess, to decide which products deserve that spot.
A lot of shelf decisions get made on instinct, what looks good, what's always been there, what a rep suggested last time. That's not necessarily wrong, but it's not measured either, and it's easy to keep an underperformer in a prime spot out of habit rather than evidence.
Placement stays the same because it's always been that way, not because the numbers say it should.
Placement follows what customers actually bought, real units, real margin, not a guess about what looks right.
Looking at something isn't the same as buying it. A shopper can study a product for five seconds and still walk away, attention alone doesn't guarantee a sale. SlottedAI works from your own units-sold and margin numbers, the actual record of what customers chose, and ranks accordingly. Nothing to infer, nothing to guess.
Your sales and margin numbers are yours, and here's specifically what's in place to keep them that way:
The full details live in our Privacy Policy.
None of this is proprietary or secret. Below is the primary source this page rests on, current academic work on the same question, and the trade benchmark for the kind of business SlottedAI is built for. Three of the four are free to read in full.