Sage Concept Grants: Shop Builder from Gorilla
Shop Builder from Gorilla is one of the 5 winners of the £2,000 Sage Concept Grant in 2023.
Dr Johanna Tomczak, Research Specialist, Gorilla Experiment Builder
The Shop Builder - part of the Gorilla Experiment Builder suite of tools - is a unique product that allows a variety of researchers to easily create a simulated and interactive online shop to gather a rich dataset and directly study consumer behaviour as an alternative, or addition, to self-reports. Our current Shop Builder offers the core features of a testable online shop with custom products, discounts, taxes, and nudges and has been used successfully by economists, marketing researchers, health scientists and epidemiologists in a range of institutions, both academic and commercial. Nevertheless, Shop Builder was funded through consultancy work, and lacks the usability and generalisability for a much wider group of researchers.
Our solution is Shop Builder 2, an evolution of Shop Builder 1, built on the same architecture as our powerful second generation Gorilla Task and Questionnaire Builders. Alongside an improved user experience, we want to add two key new features: skinnability (a range of user interfaces e.g. delivery app, price comparison site etc.) and scriptability (the ability to add scripts for greater customisability). We also want to make use of other core features of our tooling, for example, the ability to preview the shop live.
The Sage grant will be used to contribute towards our development costs, so that researchers can create more realistic simulations of consumer behaviour, which will enable them to understand purchasing patterns to address health and environmental challenges for the common good.
Are you curious about our Shop Builder and want to find out more? You can currently use Shop Builder 1 by following the steps below:
sign up for a free Gorilla account here
create a shop by clicking on Create > Tasks/Questionnaires > Shop Builder
to launch a shop: create a new experiment by clicking on Create > Experiments > Experiment Builder; then click ‘Edit’ and ‘Add New Node’ and choose ‘Task’, where you can now select the shop you just created; you will then need to set up the recruitment (this step requires purchased tokens) and collect data
