Most purchase decisions are made at the shelf during just a few critical seconds. The ability for a product to attract shoppers’
visual attention has a strong influence on the choices they make – products that are unseen are often unsold.

What do I get out of eye tracking?

Eye tracking provides unique methods to understand in store interaction between consumers and the shelf. Collect new insights about attention, saliency, interest, gaze path, and impact of brand, packaging and placement. Measure spontaneous reactions and behaviours and avoid results biased by familiarity or the social desirability effect.

Do shoppers see the product on the shelf?

A heat map gives an aggregated view of how several respondents looked at a shelf. By using the AOI tool and the Participant % metric in Tobii Studio you can reveal the percentage of the respondents that look at least once at a specific product.

Eye tracking is a powerful tool for developing, assessing and improving packaging systems:

  • raise the find ability level
  • foresee the effects of product line extensions
  • determine when packaging changes are advisable
  • test packaging attributes for belongingness into a specific product category
  • benchmark the design against product properties
  • understand the decision making process

source: http://www.tobii.com/market_research_usability/research_fields/retail_shopping.aspx