Every Item on Bass Pro Shops Shelves

Ora reads retail shelves the way it reads weekly ads: store by store, item by item. This is Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s.

The numbers

Bass Pro Shops runs 156 stores: 145 in the United States and 11 in Canada, under the Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s banners. One request returns all of them with address, phone, hours, and coordinates.

The catalog, minus small boats, shooting, archery, and knives, is 217,420 SKUs on 58,826 products. Every SKU has a UPC and a price. Another 8,740 listings have no sellable SKU today, unreleased or discontinued.

The shelf on day one is fishing and camping first: 75,885 SKUs, all 156 stores, 4,722,210 store-by-item rows, 2,140,205 of them in stock.

How long it took, and how many requests

The catalog is one row per SKU with its merchant id, UPC, name, brand, description, photo, variant id, size, color, and taxonomy. The inventory is one row per SKU per store with price, sale price, quantity, in-stock flag, crawl time, and whether the store carries the item at all. The store list is id, name, banner, address, phone, hours, and coordinates. Store ids are zero-padded to five digits. Column names do not change between runs. The catalog refreshes monthly, the shelf daily.

The shelf reads only the pairs the catalog says a store carries: 6.8 million of the 33.9 million possible store-by-item pairs, one in five. The other departments, about 36,000 more requests, follow the same way.

A rod is fifteen rows

A product page is not an item. The Tourney Special Spinning Rod is 15 SKUs, from a 5’6” light one-piece to a 7’ medium heavy two-piece. Each is its own row with its own merchant id, its own UPC, and its own shelf count. The variant id ties the 15 together. Length, power, action, and pieces are each their own column.

Taxonomy is the retailer’s own, up to five levels deep: Fishing, Rods, Freshwater Spinning Rods, BPS Spinning Rods. Brand is a field, not a guess from the name. Descriptions are on 99 percent of SKUs, a primary photo on 98 percent, and additional photos on 59 percent; items with a single image have none. The one blank column is the product page URL, which the retailer’s data service does not carry.

The shelf

Each inventory row carries the store’s available quantity and a three-way flag: “Many in stock” above two units, “Low in stock” at one or two, “Out of stock” at zero. On day one, 1,196,104 rows are many and 944,101 are low. 56,733 of the 75,885 SKUs are on at least one shelf.

The median store has 14,527 fishing and camping SKUs in stock. The deepest shelf is the Springfield, Missouri flagship with 22,965. The thinnest is Stuttgart, Arkansas, a Mack’s Prairie Wings store, with 2,547. One store, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, reports nothing on any shelf. A zero can mean carried and out, or never carried here.

Download the Bass Pro Shops day-one dataset (27 MB) for your own analysis: all 156 stores with address, hours, and coordinates, the 75,885-SKU fishing and camping catalog with UPCs, descriptions, photos, and variant attributes, and every store’s shelf for those SKUs from the September 3 read.