What we found
The idea. The Wikipedia article on all-commodity volume (ACV) explains how to weight shops by their sales. It gives a small example. A city has two hardware retailers. Retailer 1 has five big-box stores that sell 15 million US dollars a week. Retailer 2 has five smaller stores that sell 5 million. Together the city's weekly sales are 20 million.
The surprise. If a product is sold only through Retailer 2, it is in half of the stores but reaches only 25% of the sales (5 out of 20). If it is sold only through Retailer 1, it is still in half of the stores but reaches 75% of the sales (15 out of 20). The shop count is the same. The reach is three times apart. The article draws on the book Marketing Metrics by Paul Farris, Neil Bendle, Phillip Pfeifer and David Reibstein (Pearson, 2010).
What we learnt
Two ways to count. Numeric distribution is the number of shops that stock your product, divided by the number of shops that sell the category, times 100. Weighted distribution is the sales of the category in the shops that stock you, divided by the sales of the category in all the shops, times 100. Some firms weight each shop by its total sales across every product. That is the version in the Wikipedia article, and it is called all-commodity volume (ACV). Others weight by category sales only. Pick one way and keep it the same each time, or your months will not compare.
Why this matters here. Many Indian FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) brands still reach buyers through small traditional shops, and our FMCG industry page quotes NielsenIQ and Kantar on how much. A distributor can add a hundred small shops and make the shop count look good. Meanwhile the few big stores where a large part of the buying happens may still be missing. The reverse also happens. A brand in a handful of big chains can look strong on sales and still be absent from most of the shops near your buyer.
A made-up example. Say a district has 200 shops that sell tea. These numbers are made up. 120 small shops make 30% of the district's tea sales, 60 mid-size shops make 30%, and 20 big stores make 40%. Brand A sits in all 120 small shops and nowhere else. Its numeric distribution is 120 out of 200, which is 60%. Its weighted distribution is 30%. Brand B sits in the 20 big stores and in 10 of the mid-size shops. Its numeric distribution is 30 out of 200, which is 15%. Its weighted distribution is 40% from the big stores, plus 5% from the mid-size shops (10 of 60 is one sixth of 30%), which is 45%.
What the example shows. By shop count, Brand A looks four times stronger than Brand B. By sales, Brand B reaches one and a half times more of the buying. Neither number alone is the truth. What you do next depends on where your buyers shop.
What a business can do on Monday
- Ask your distributor for the shop list of one town: name, area, size (small, mid-size or big) and about how much of the category each shop buys in a month.
- Mark the shops that stock your product today. A call to the shop or a shelf photo from your sales person is enough.
- Work out the first number: shops that stock you, divided by all shops, times 100. Then the second: the monthly category buying of the shops that stock you, divided by that of all shops, times 100. Write "estimate" next to any figure you guessed.
- Read them together. Shop count low but sales number high? You are in the right big shops, so add smaller shops through your wholesaler. Shop count high but sales number low? You are in many small shops and missing the big ones, so plan how to reach the larger stores.
- Repeat each month with the same method, and compare with your own last month, not with a rival's number.
A word of care. Large research firms measure these numbers across thousands of shops. Yours will be a rough count of one town, and that is fine if you say so and keep the method the same. Do not quote your estimate as if it were a market-wide figure.
If you want help with dealer schemes and shop visits, see our trade and channel marketing work. For the order in which to enter towns and channels, see go-to-market strategy.
Read the original: Wikipedia, “All-commodity volume”, read on 2 November 2026, read it here.
