What is Assortment?

Assortment is the full range of products a brand or retailer offers at a given time, described along two axes. Breadth is the number of distinct product lines or categories carried. Depth is the number of variations within each line, counting sizes, colors, pack counts and formats. Retail strategy trades one against the other, so a specialist tends to run narrow and deep while a hypermarket runs wide and shallow. For a brand selling through third parties, assortment is only observable from the outside. What a retailer agreed to list and what actually appears on the digital shelf are often different, and measuring that gap is the practical work of assortment monitoring.

Why it matters?

• Determines how much of a brand's range a shopper can actually reach at each retailer
• Surfaces delisted or never-listed SKUs that still appear in internal plans as active
• Sets the denominator for share of shelf, since fixing a category boundary is itself an assortment decision

How it is used?

• Assortment gap analysis comparing agreed range against listed range by retailer
• New listing and delisting detection across accounts and regions
• Competitor range tracking to size a category and spot expansion into adjacent segments

Assortment describes the range offered. Availability describes whether one item in that range can be bought right now. A SKU can sit in a retailer's assortment and be out of stock, or be missing from the assortment altogether, and those two situations lead to different conversations with different people. Assortment is also separate from a product catalog, which is the brand's internal master list rather than what any given retailer has chosen to carry.