Simplified Shelf Choice

Simplified Shelf Choice shows respondents a virtual store shelf. Pack shots stand on shelf rows over a store background. Respondents tap a product to look at it closely, choose how many to buy and add it to their cart. When they are done they press Check Out, or Buy None if nothing appeals. You learn which products each person bought, how many, and which products they saw but passed over.

It is in the Choice Modeling group of the question palette, after Conjoint. It is the Survey Builder version of the Qualtrics Simplified Shelf Choice script. There is no importer for Qualtrics questions: build the shelf in the product table, or paste the products into Bulk edit (it accepts Excel rows and Qualtrics product strings).

When to use it:

• Shelf tests: which pack, size or price wins when products stand side by side.
• Price or range tests: show the same shelf at different prices to different groups.
• Any "what would you buy?" task where seeing the products together matters.

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Adding the question#

Drag Simplified Shelf Choice from Choice Modeling onto your survey. A new question is not empty: it starts with a ready-made example, a cleaning-products shelf with 34 products and the instructions text from the original Qualtrics question, on a shelf of 2 rows × 6 columns. Edit or replace the products to build your own shelf.

A new shelf question is not required, and it has no validation rules: Buy None always counts as a complete answer.

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What respondents see#

• The instructions (your question text) open in a popup when the shelf loads. If the question text contains a |, only the part before the first | is shown, as in Qualtrics. They close it with Let's Go and can reopen it at any time with the Instructions button.
• The shelf: products stand on the shelf rows, each with a price tag across its base. Pointing at a product with a mouse shows its name.
• Tapping a product opens a product popup with the name, "by brand", the price, the size and a large picture. If you allow more than one of each product, they choose a quantity first, then press Add To Cart. A cart badge with the quantity appears on the product.
• The buttons on the right:
  • Buy None while the cart is empty. Check Out is shown greyed out until the first product is added.
  • Empty Cart and an active Check Out once something is in the cart.
  • If the cart is emptied again, Check Out is hidden until the next product is added.
  • Instructions at all times (unless the question text is empty).
• In Single mode, Add To Cart ends the question straight away and there is no Check Out.
• Closing the product popup (✕, Esc, or tapping outside it) does not change the cart, with one exception: to take a product out of the cart, the respondent opens it, chooses Select Item Count in the quantity list and closes the popup. Picking a new quantity only changes the cart when they press Add To Cart. (With a max quantity of 1 there is no quantity list; Empty Cart is the way to take products out.)
• The product popup scrolls when it is taller than the screen (for example on a phone held sideways), so Add To Cart can always be reached.
• The shelf fits the screen on phones, tablets and desktops, and re-arranges itself when a phone is rotated without losing the cart.
• If a respondent goes back and returns, they get exactly the shelf they left: the same products in the same places, with the same cart.

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Building the shelf#

The products are edited right on the question card. Select the question to open the product table.

The summary bar#

The bar above the table reads, for example, "2 rows × 6 = 12 slots · 34 products · first 12 on shelf". It tells you how many product places (slots) the shelf has and which products will be shown. When the random draw is on it says "12 drawn at random", and when you use groups it adds "group order shuffled" (for example "first 12 on shelf, group order shuffled"). Click Preview shelf beside it to see an approximate picture of the shelf (see Previewing the shelf).

The product table#

Each row is one product:

Under each product, a short line such as "Scale 0.56 · 1 facing · no group" sums up its details. Click it to open them:

The ⋯ menu on a row has Duplicate, Move to top / up / down / bottom, Copy as Qualtrics string and Delete. You can also drag a row by the grip (⋮⋮) at its left edge; the list scrolls when you drag near its top or bottom. To move a row with the keyboard, focus the grip, press Space, move it with the arrow keys and press Space again to drop it.

Keyboard: Enter adds a product below. Tab from the Size box moves to the next product's name, and on the last row adds a new product. Alt+↑ / Alt+↓ move the product up or down.

"Products below this line are not on the shelf"#

The shelf only has rows × columns slots. When you have more products than slots and the random draw is off, a line appears in the table after the last product that fits. Products below this line are not shown to respondents (they are stored as -99, see Reading the answers). Move a product above the line to put it on the shelf, or turn on the random draw to rotate products. Groups do not move the line: the shelf takes the first rows × columns products first, and only then arranges them group by group.

Problems the builder points out#

Messages under a product or under the table tell you what to fix:

• Must be fixed before you can save: a shelf with no products, or rows, columns or max quantity out of range.
• Must be fixed before you can publish (your work still saves, so you can price a batch of new products over several sessions): a product without a name, a price or a picture; a price below 0; a picture that is not a web address (https://…); facings that are not a whole number; a scale outside 0–1.
• Worth checking (these do not block anything): empty slots because there are fewer products than slots; two products with the same name, brand, size and price; so many facings that more than 12 pack shots share one shelf row (they get very small); a random draw that shows a different number of products than the shelf has slots.
• For your information: which products are not on the shelf, for example "Products 13–34 are not on the shelf".

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Adding products quickly#

Two buttons under the table, besides + Add product, each with an ⓘ that explains it.

Add images#

Drop several pack shots at once, or click to choose files.

• On an empty shelf, every image becomes a product, named from its file name (mr-clean_lemon_64oz.png becomes "mr clean lemon 64oz"). Add the prices afterwards; the builder flags every product without one, and the survey can't be published until they are all priced (it still saves).
• On a shelf that already has products, images are matched to the products that have no picture yet, first by file name, then in row order. A review table shows every pairing so you can change it, name a new product, or skip a file before anything is uploaded. Two files cannot go to the same product.

If some uploads fail, the ones that worked are kept and the failed files stay in the list so you can try again.

Bulk edit (from Excel)#

Opens every product as a spreadsheet with the columns Name, Brand, Price, Size, Scale, Facings, Group, Image (the Image column is the picture's web address).

• Paste straight from Excel or Google Sheets. If the first row you paste is a header, columns are matched by name, wherever they are: "Manufacturer" goes to Brand, "Ounce", "oz" or "Unit" to Size, "Category" to Group, "Picture" or "URL" to Image, and so on. Without a header, the cells fill the columns to the right of where you paste.
• You can also paste Qualtrics product strings, one per line, in the format name|brand|price|size|scale|facings|group|image, where image is an <img src="…"> tag or a web address. Shorter lines work too: the last field is always the picture.
• Copy all rows copies the grid with a header row and a last Product ID column, so you can edit it in Excel and paste it back.

Existing products keep their logic, recode values and variable names when you edit them here. When you paste back a sheet with the Product ID column, each line updates the product it was copied from, even if you sorted or reordered the sheet in Excel. Without that column, pasted lines overwrite the rows in the order they arrive, so keep the Product ID column whenever you reorder.

Copy a product as a Qualtrics string#

The ⋯ menu on any product has Copy as Qualtrics string, which copies the product in the Qualtrics pipe format.

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Settings#

Open the Settings tab. Every setting has an ⓘ with a short explanation.

Shelf layout

The line under them shows the number of slots and how many products do not fit, or how many slots stay empty.

Purchase

Appearance

Product order

Below it, a line tells you whether the random draw is on. Off means the first rows × columns products are shown, in the order listed, or, when products have groups, placed group by group in a shuffled group order.

Messages#

The Messages tab holds every word respondents see, in three groups: the shelf buttons (Buy None, Check Out, Empty Cart, Instructions), the product popup (Add To Cart, the quantity placeholder, "1 Item", "{n} Items", "by {brand}") and the instructions popup's close button (Let's Go). In "{n} Items" and "by {brand}", the part in braces is replaced by the number or the brand. Leave a box empty to use the default.

Text size#

Text size has two controls: question text (the instructions popup) and Product name text (the product details in the popup and the price tags).

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Showing a random selection of products (opt-in)#

By default every respondent sees the same shelf: the first rows × columns products in the order you listed them. To rotate a bigger range of products, open the Randomization section of the question, captioned Random product draw (off by default), and choose Shuffle with Present only N. Each respondent then gets a random selection of products instead. The shelf offers only None and Shuffle; Set Groupings, Flip and Advanced are not available here, because the shelf groups products with each product's own Group detail.

• When you turn it on, the number of products to show is filled in with the number of slots (for a 2 × 6 shelf, 12). If you later change the rows or columns, that number follows the slot count, unless you changed it yourself.
• Products a respondent was not shown are stored as -99, the same as products below the line.
• With groups, the order of the groups is shuffled for each respondent, among the products that are on the shelf. Each respondent keeps the same order when they reload the page or go back.

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Previewing the shelf#

Preview shelf on the card shows an approximate picture: the background, each product at its scale with its facings, the price tags, and a list of the products that do not fit. When you use groups or the random draw, Reshuffle shows another respondent's shelf. The real sizing depends on the respondent's screen, so use Open Preview to try the actual shelf.

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Reading the answers#

The answer holds one number for every product on your list:

For example, a respondent who bought two of one product and nothing else, on a 12-slot shelf with 34 products, has one product at 2, eleven at 0 and twenty-two at -99. Buy None gives 0 for every shown product and -99 for the rest.

In Response Details, the answer lists the bought products with their quantity ("Bought nothing" after Buy None), the other shown products as "0 (not bought)", and a closed Not shown list you can open.

The answer is saved when the respondent leaves the shelf: Check Out, Buy None, or Add To Cart in Single mode moves them on and saves it. Someone who closes the survey in the middle of shopping on their first visit has no answer saved for the question. If they had already finished the shelf and came back to it, the answer from that earlier visit is kept, and changes made since are not.

The survey summary email lists the bought products with their quantity ("Bought nothing" after Buy None), then "Not bought: …", then "Not on shelf: N products". It never shows -99.

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Logic and piping#

The question works with Display logic, Skip Logic (After Question) and Termination. In a condition, pick the shelf question, then the product, then compare its number:

In conditions (and in quotas), a product that was not on the shelf has no value: Is Empty is true for it, and number comparisons such as Is Less Than 1 do not match it. Auto-answer is not offered for this question.

• Piping: Selected Choices and Selected Choices Count list the bought products. Unselected Choices lists the products that were on the shelf and not bought (0); products that were not shown are never included.
• Carry forward from the shelf: "selected" means bought, so you can carry the bought products into a later question. Displayed carries the products that were on the respondent's shelf, Not displayed the ones that were not, and Unselected the ones on the shelf that were not bought.
• Loop & Merge: a shelf question cannot be used as a loop source.
• Carry forward into the shelf is not available: every product needs its own price, picture and shelf settings, which a carried choice does not have. Add the products on the question instead.

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Good to know#

• A shelf question can share a page with other questions (turn off its page break). It still shows as a full shelf in its own frame, the page's Next button stays visible, and the full answer is stored.
• There is no Validation tab for this question: no must-total, no minimum, and it is not required. Buy None always completes it. The purchase limit per product is Max quantity in Settings.
• Pictures can be uploads, library images or any https:// web address, including images on survey-static.intuify.com from old Qualtrics surveys.
• Products that are not shown are kept in the answer as -99, never dropped, so you can always tell "not shown" apart from "shown, not bought".
• HM Admin: the question's analysis type is set (SimplifiedShelfChoice), but syncing shelf answers to HM Admin, its Quant Analysis, the CSV export check and shelf charts in the builder's analytics are not available yet. Summary charts would count -99 as a number, and the CSV export of shelf answers has not been checked yet, so read shelf results in Response Details for now.
• The builder's Preview shelf is an approximation. Always check the real shelf with Open Preview, on a phone as well as a desktop.

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Related guides#

• Conjoint and MaxDiff, the other Choice Modeling questions
• Display logic and Skip logic
• Carry forward and piping
• Randomization and loops
• QSF import and export