Measuring what shoppers do – NOT

what they say they do.

Most of a purchase decision happens in seconds, below conscious awareness. Shoppers cannot reliably tell you why they chose — they often do not know themselves.

TBS measures the decision directly. A controlled environment, eye tracking, behavioural observation, and a cognitive science layer — capturing what happens at the moment of choice, and why.

Understanding how people decide – before they decide.

We use neuroscience and behavioural science to help brands predict, shape, and strengthen consumer decision-making.

Four layers. One evidence base.

A survey captures what people say. Analytics capture what they did, in aggregate. Neither explains the decision itself.

TBS works across four layers that build on each other:

The environment

A controlled replica of any platform, where behaviour is real but every variable is fixed. Since nothing else changes, any shift in behaviour comes from the one thing you are testing.

Attention

Eye tracking that captures where the eye goes, in what order, for how long. What a shopper skips matters as much as what they look at.

Behaviour

Direct observation and think-aloud, capturing what a shopper does and thinks in the moment. Not what they remember and explain later.

Interpretation

A cognitive science layer that explains why it happened, and what it means for your conversion. This is what turns raw data into a decision you can act on.

No single layer is enough on its own. Together, they show you what no one tool can.

Digital Store Sandbox

A controlled copy of any platform — behaviour stays real, every variable is yours.

Amazon, Myntra, Nykaa, Flipkart, and Blinkit do not let outsiders run tracking on their live platforms. And even if they did, a live platform keeps changing — prices, competitors, stock. You cannot measure cleanly on a moving target.

The Sandbox solves both problems. We build an exact copy of the target platform and drop your product into it. To the shopper, it looks like the real store. For us, every variable is fixed — so any change in behaviour points to the thing being tested, not to noise.

What it gives you

Clean measurement, free of live-platform noise

A/B testing where only the tested element changes

Your product placed next to the competitors a shopper actually sees
One platform copy, reused across many studies

It answers

How does my listing do against the competitors next to it?

Which version holds attention and moves shoppers to cart?

Where do shoppers drop off before deciding?

Platforms

Amazon India · Myntra · Nykaa · Flipkart · Blinkit · Zepto · Swiggy Instamart · D2C · Social commerce

Eye Tracking

Where a shopper looks is the best clue to what they will buy.

Decades of research point the same way: in fast, visual decisions, attention predicts choice better than anything else. What a shopper looks at — and what they never look at — shapes what they buy, often before they have consciously thought about it.

TBS captures this in the browser, using the shopper’s own phone or laptop camera. No special hardware. No lab.

We capture

Fixations

Where the eye settles, and for how long. Longer means deeper attention; quick skipping means they are filtering it out.

Order

What they see first, what they reach last, what they never reach.

Heatmaps

What pulls the eye, and what gets ignored.

Areas of Interest

Attention measured on the image, price, reviews, CTA, and claims.

An honest note on accuracy

This is not lab-grade infrared eye tracking, and we do not pretend it is. It is less precise, and it depends on lighting and camera quality.

That is why we run controlled sessions, design our test areas accordingly, and check the quality of every session before we use it.

Within those limits, it reliably shows what matters — what gets seen, in what order, and what gets ignored. Claiming more precision than that is how research loses its value.

Devices

Smartphone · Laptop · Desktop

Observation & Qualitative Methods

Attention shows where they looked. Observation shows what they did. Talking shows what they were thinking.

A shopper might fixate on a price because they like it — or because it worries them. To tell the difference, TBS adds observation and conversation on top of the attention data.

Surveys & Structured Measurement

The explicit layer — what shoppers can consciously report, captured rigorously.

Not everything is unconscious. Brand perception, stated preference, recall, segmentation — these are consciously accessible, and a good survey captures them at scale.

TBS uses surveys to complement the behavioural data — never to replace it. The sharpest insight often sits in the gap: when what a shopper says diverges from what they did.

Used for

Brand perception · recall and attitude shift · segmentation · stated preference, measured against revealed behaviour

Cognitive Science Framework

The interpretation layer. This is what separates evidence from data.

Gaze data, recordings, survey results — on their own, just patterns. The question a client needs answered is why. Why attention went where it did, why a shopper hesitated, what to change.

Cognitive load — too much to process, and decisions stall or default away.

Salience — what catches the eye is rarely what the brand thinks matters.

Fluency — easier-to-process information is trusted and preferred, regardless of content.

Time pressure — decisions made in seconds rely on a few cues; those cues drive choice.

On rigour

Attention predicts choice reliably under specific conditions — visual decisions, few alternatives, short horizons. In complex or emotional decisions, it is one signal, not a proxy for preference. TBS interprets accordingly — separating what the evidence proves from what it suggests. That discipline is what makes a recommendation safe to act on.

A research and technology company — building forward.

The current stack is the foundation. In development:

Facial emotion recognition

Browser-based emotional response at the moment of exposure.

Reaction-time measurement

Browser-based timing as an index of cognitive load and implicit association.

An Indian shopper benchmark

Every study adds to a dataset of how Indian shoppers behave on Indian platforms. Over time, normative benchmark data that does not exist for this market today.

Want to understand the technology in your context? Talk to us.

Let’s find out what is stopping them.

Sukalyan Deb

Cognitive Neuroscientist, IISc

Rupam Chakraborty

Co-Founder

FAQs (Clarity Before Collaboration)

Clarity helps good decisions. Here are a few questions we’re often asked about how we work and what to expect.

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