Methodology & Data Practices

How data is captured

Every number GOTR publishes traces back to an actual point-of-sale transaction at a participating running store — not a survey response, not a panel estimate, not a projection. When a runner buys something at a connected store, that transaction is captured directly from the store's point-of-sale system. We don't ask stores to estimate, recall, or self-report their sales after the fact; we capture the transaction record itself.

Today, that connection happens through a Shopify integration: a participating store installs the GOTR Shopify app, and from that point sales data syncs automatically as transactions happen — no manual entry required. GOTR is built to support other point-of-sale platforms beyond Shopify over time; that isn't available yet, but it's a deliberate part of how the system is designed, not an afterthought.

This is what "captured, not surveyed" means in practice: the data reflects what was actually recorded at the point of sale, at the time it happened, rather than someone's memory or estimate of it afterward.

The anonymisation floor

A store's own sales figures are commercially sensitive to that business — which is exactly why the floor works the way it does:

No cross-store data point is ever published, shown, or shared unless at least ten stores in the same country are contributing to it. That floor is calculated separately for each country, never pooled across them. This isn't a soft guideline — it's a hard floor built directly into how any cross-store number gets calculated. If fewer than ten stores in that country are behind a given comparison, that comparison simply doesn't get shown to anyone, including the stores themselves.

The purpose of this floor is straightforward: with fewer than ten stores in a comparison, an individual store's own numbers could realistically be worked out from the aggregate. At ten or more, no single store's data can be isolated from the group.

A store's own data, shown only to that store on its own dashboard, isn't subject to this floor — the floor applies specifically to comparisons across stores.

Where the data lives

Data is stored and processed within the European Union — specifically in Amsterdam, Netherlands — under EU data protection law.

What we're specific about, and what we're not — yet

We can be precise about exactly how data is captured, protected, and anonymised, because those are decisions we've already made and built. We're intentionally not making claims here about how many stores, or which countries, are currently contributing — that's a question of current scale, not of how the mechanism works, and it changes over time as more stores connect. If you need to know current coverage for a specific purpose, ask us directly.

Why this page exists

If you're evaluating GOTR from a brand, an investment, or a research angle, this page is meant to be the place you can point to so you can verify how the data is handled yourself, without needing a sales call first. See For Brands, For Investors, or For Researchers for what this means specifically for your situation.