Compare sites

Compare sites is the shortlist tool. You give it two to five labeled candidate points, a category and a set of suitability weights; it returns, for every candidate, the same three views you would otherwise assemble by hand: a suitability score, a Huff visit forecast and a close-in catchment.

When to use it

• After a suitability run, to evaluate the top three to five sites in depth.
• When a broker sends a handful of available units and you need a consistent comparison.
• To test your own existing stores alongside candidates — add an existing store’s coordinates to see how the model rates it.

Inputs

Input	Description
city, category	Market and store category
sites	1–5 objects { label, lng, lat }; each point must be inside the city’s study area
weights	Suitability weights (0–10 per criterion; see Site suitability)

In the app: Site selection → Compare sites, then add sites by clicking the map, by sending top sites from a suitability run, or by entering coordinates. Via the API: POST /api/v1/sdss/compare-sites (reference). The whole comparison counts as one analysis.

What you get per site

Block	Contents
score, criteria	Suitability score (0–100) and the nine normalized criteria of the hex containing the point, using your weights
huff	The full Huff forecast — predicted daily and annual visits, market share, category average, cannibalization and impacted stores — without the trade-area polygons, to keep the response small
catchment_1	A catchment ring of 1 mile in US cities or 1.6 km in Dubai

The Huff forecast in Compare sites uses the category’s typical store size and an average brand strength (1.0). To test a specific format, run the Huff tool for that site separately.

Reading a comparison

Lay the sites out as columns and read across:

Question	Look at
Is the area favorable on our criteria?	score, then the criteria driving it
How much traffic would we get?	huff.predicted_daily_visits vs huff.category_avg_daily_visits
How much is new vs transferred?	huff.total_cannibalized_daily ÷ predicted visits
Do we hurt our own stores?	Own-brand entries in huff.impacted
Who lives right around it?	catchment_1 population, income, segment mix
How crowded is it?	catchment_1.places_by_category

Disagreement between the blocks is informative. A site with a high suitability score but a modest forecast is usually favorable on demographics yet already well served by competitors — check the competition and gap criteria. A site with a strong forecast but heavy cannibalization of your own network may be a relocation candidate rather than an addition.

A simple decision matrix

Many teams turn the comparison into a short weighted table for the investment committee:

	Site A	Site B	Site C
Suitability score	74	68	61
Predicted daily visits	382	441	305
vs category average	1.11×	1.28×	0.88×
Own-brand cannibalization / day	58	12	0
Net new visits / day	324	429	305
1-mile population	18,400	22,900	11,200

(Illustrative figures from the demo dataset.) Here Site B wins despite a lower suitability score, because it captures more traffic with little impact on the existing network.

Saving and sharing

Save the comparison as a project of kind compare to keep the sites, weights and full result. Teammates can reopen it, edit the notes and re-run with updated weights. See Your first site analysis.

Limitations

The comparison inherits the assumptions of each underlying model: straight-line distances, same-category competition only, area-weighted ring demographics and synthetic data. See Methodology and Demo data.