Frequently asked questions

Pulster is a decision intelligence platform for retail in selected Latin American markets. It uses the same market, mobility, and competitor data to help retail chains decide where to open new stores and how to compete more effectively.

We have clients in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. Peru is our next market. If your country is not on the list, we can open new markets after evaluating it with you.

Retail chains that open stores or compete for visits: restaurants, supermarkets, pharmacies, hardware stores, and banks. Also shopping centers and real estate developers.

Pulster NOVA helps you decide where to open and how much each store could sell. Pulster RADAR shows what is happening around your stores: who wins the visits, whether customers come back, and where they come from. Both use the same data.

We work with six data layers: population and socioeconomic profile, businesses, mobility, trade areas, points of interest, and building permits. Our Data and methodology page explains what each one measures, what it is for, and its limits.

No. We work with aggregated and anonymized data. We see how groups of visitors move, never individuals.

Mobility data is updated every two weeks and business data every month.

96% accuracy forecasting first-year sales at existing stores, validated in a blind test with a leading quick-service restaurant chain. The model was not trained on those stores. The average error per store was under 4%. This test was run on existing stores and does not guarantee the same accuracy for new stores.

Only the analyst assigned to your account, in a controlled environment. Your data is stored separately from other clients’ data and is used only for your work. We can sign an NDA if you need one.

No. You can use it yourself or receive finished analyses. You choose how hands-on you want us to be.

As a reference, about 8 hours a month, depending on the agreed scope. In the first month, you share where your stores are and a list of your competitors, and we meet to define your goals.

Setup takes one month. After that, certain analyses take hours or about a day.

You tell us about the decision you need to make, and we show you a similar example. We see whether we can analyze your case; if we can, we explain the next steps. We do not deliver results in the first meeting: first we map the area and process the data.

It depends on the number of stores, countries, and analyses you need. We will walk you through it in the first meeting, based on your case.

Yes. We move in stages: we start with one decision and grow when it makes sense for you.

Yes. Pulster NOVA and Pulster RADAR are available separately or together.

A market or feasibility study gives you a snapshot and takes 2 to 3 months. Pulster uses data updated every month and every two weeks, so it supports your next decision too. To understand why people buy, a study with interviews is still useful.

Pulster helps retail chains decide where to open new stores in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, as well as Colombia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. It compares sites, forecasts sales, and shows which of your stores could lose customers.

Yes. Location intelligence means using location data to decide where to open stores and how to win more customers. That is what Pulster NOVA and Pulster RADAR do.

A trade area is how far a store reaches. We calculate it using real travel times, such as everything within a 10-minute drive, rather than circles on a map, because a river or a highway changes who can get there.

With anonymized, aggregated mobility data that shows how many visits an area, your store, and your competitors receive, and where visitors come from. It is a sample, not a count of every person: it is designed for comparisons and trends.

Cannibalization is when a new store takes customers from one of your existing stores. We look at how much of the trade area they share and how many visitors they have in common, and estimate how much sales could drop before you decide to open.