The Virtual Supermarket: an innovative research tool to study food purchasing behaviour

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Availability & Licence conditions

Licence

The application can be obtained for free for academic purposes without any further agreements.

Any restrictions to use by non-academics:
The application in its current form may not be used for commercial purposes. Before using the application, non-academics should contact us via wilma.waterlander@falw.vu.nl or ingrid.steenhuis@falw.vu.nl.

How you can use the Virtual Supermarket in your own research:

We are very happy to share the Virtual Supermarket with other academic researchers. You can download the application and watch whether it fits with your research interests. On the following pages we'll provide information on how you can use the software. We tried to give as clear information as possible so that you can use the software without having to contact us. However, if you are truly interested in using the software, there are some points to be considered:

Virtual Supermarket is in Dutch
A first point to be considered is that the current Virtual Supermarket is based on a Dutch supermarket. This means that the products are representative for the Netherlands, and not necessarily for other countries. At this moment, we are working on developing an English language version of the tool. This version will probably be based on Australian/ New Zealand supermarkets. If you are Dutch and interested in using the tool, you can use it right away. Otherwise, we can provide you the Dutch version, but it will require some alterations before you can use it in your own country. We will provide all the information you require for this process without any further agreements. You can find our contact details on this website.

You can create different experimental conditions
The Virtual Supermarket is developed in such a way that researchers can make their own experimental conditions without assistance from an expert programmer. For example, you can easily change food prices, include different questionnaires, or include food labels.

Here, we describe some of the most important modifications you can make in the Virtual Supermarket. This way, you can try it yourself, without having to contact us.

The manipulation of research conditions works via the back-end of the program (see also BMC manuscript). If you open the 'Data' folder in the opening window (see 'How the program works' on this website) you see the following folders:

content
These folders can be used to change:
All of these changes can be made using comma-separated values in Excel or using a text editor.

For example, if we open the 'Prices' folder we see:
prices

All of these Excel files contain the prices for a certain experimental condition. For example 'controle' means the prices in a control condition (the regular prices).

You can easily modify these Excel files. Afterwards, by placing the right Excel files in the folder 'Scenarios' you can modify research conditions. This works as follows:
If you open the 'Scenarios' folder you see a file named Matrix. You can use this matrix to make up the research conditions.
scenarios

For example, in this matrix, all people that log in with a respondent code starting with an 'A' receive the prices as listed in the Excel file 'control.csv'. All people that log in with a respondent code starting with a 'B' receive the prices as listed in the Excel file 'Condition3.csv'. You can make your own matrix, using all the letters of the alphabet.

If you wish to make more drastic modifications
The Virtual Supermarket is a unique research tool which you can use to conduct several experiments within a retail environment. We provide the Virtual Supermarket for free for all academic researchers. The program was developed in such a way that you can easily modify research conditions without any further assistance. However, the program was specifically designed for food pricing experiments. The application may also be very useful to study other effects, such as the size of the supermarket or product placement, but this requires more drastic modifications to the program. These modifications can not be made without assistance from an expert programmer.

Since the development of a Virtual Supermarket is very costly, it may be useful to use the basis of our tool for further development to your own needs. The Virtual Supermarket was designed in such a way that you can make modifications at different levels, without having to develop complete new software. Also for your research, we can provide the basis, from which you can build further. This will save you a lot of time and money. Please contact us if you are interested in this.