Shelf Test contains a product editor that gives you the flexibility to tailor your product images and control exactly how they appear on the shelves. Add facings to products, adjust the scale of products, and populate the shelves to create a test that precisely reflects what your purchasers experience when shopping.
Learn more about Shelf Test in our Lighthouse Academy course!
In This Article
- Adding Shelf Test to a Survey
- Scaling Products
- Updating Product Images
- Updating Product Details
- Navigating Products in the Editor
- What Respondents See
- Editing the Number of Product Facings on Your Shelf
- Download Shelf Image
- Related Articles
Adding Shelf Test to a Survey
- Drag and drop the icon into the body of the Survey Editor, or click the icon itself to add Shelf Test to your survey.
- Type or paste a question into the Question text field. Be sure to give respondents clear instructions on how to complete the task. If they should approach it with a specific mindset, note that here as well.
- Type or paste a list of products into the Product name text fields.
- Click the camera icon on the right-hand side of the text field to select corresponding product images from your hard drive.
⚠️ Note: The recommended best practice is to set the item limit at 50 products. These actions can be performed in bulk to expedite the process of programming your shelves.
Click Add an item beneath your product list to add another product. The counter beside it shows how many items you have left.
You don't have to open the Product Card for every SKU. Bulk import and the product datasheet export both carry most of the card's fields—name, description, regular price, discounted price, per-count price, height, max stacking, purchasable, and units—plus a column per facing. The export is header-complete for re-import, so the round trip is a practical way to fill fifty products.
Scaling Products
Click the contact-card icon to the right of a product to open its Product Card. This is where you customize the product, and it's the only place any per-product setting lives—name, description, prices, units, stacking, purchasability, and every image the product owns.
The left half of the card is a scale workspace. Your product sits on a shelf background with measurement ticks down the left edge at full, three-quarter, half, and quarter shelf height, in the fixture's own unit.
- Click and drag the handles on the upper left- or right-hand corners to scale the product to the height it will show on the shelf. The bottom edge stays pinned to the shelf floor, and the width follows the image's own proportions.
- Drag the product itself up or down to reposition it. It can't float above the shelf, but it can sit slightly below the shelf line, the way products sit on a real fixture.
- Click the Height field to type an exact height. Height takes whole numbers and won't go below 1, so use the corner handles when you need a fractional size.
- Select the Max Stacking dropdown to customize stacking for each product. Select 1–4 to indicate the max number of products to be stacked, or select auto to stack as many products as possible based on the shelf height and product height.
- Click Apply this scale to other products to copy this height to the other products in the question.
Width is calculated for you from the height and the image's proportions. It's display-only, so there's no way to set width directly. Both labels carry the fixture's unit, so an inch-based shelf reads Height". The pair appears for a scalable slot—the main image, or the single product image on a top-shelf fixture—once the card is in edit mode.
⚠️ Note: If a product ends up bigger than the shelf can show, the card tells you that the product's size exceeded the shelf limit and was scaled to fit.
Two things are worth knowing about Apply this scale to other products:
- It copies the height of the image slot you currently have selected. With the Single product image thumbnail selected, it copies to the other products' single images rather than their main images.
- The button reads Applied! once it runs. If every product already matches, it greys out and hovering it reads All products have the same size.
Updating Product Images
One row under the workspace holds every image the product owns. Click a thumbnail to bring that image into the workspace.
- Drag and drop image files onto the strip, or click to browse your hard drive. Dropping a file anywhere on the card works—the whole panel accepts the drop, not just the outlined area.
- Drag thumbnails to reorder them. The first image you add becomes the main image automatically.
- Click a thumbnail to set what that image does: Set as main swaps it into the main slot, so it's what respondents see on the shelf. Opens on click pins it as the closer look respondents get when they click the product on the shelf.
- Click Delete image to clear the image you currently have selected. This removes the image, not the product.
- Click the 3D icon beside the strip to add a 3D or AR model. Drop the file onto it or click to browse. Clicking a slot that already holds a model opens it in the viewer with orbit and AR controls instead.
Here's what each slot is for:
| Slot | What it does |
|---|---|
| Main product image | What respondents see on the shelf. Scalable. |
| Single product image | Top-shelf fixtures only, such as club-store pallets, where the main image is the case on the pallet and this is the unit on the shelf above. Scalable. |
| Additional product image | Up to six per product, or five on a top-shelf fixture, where the single product image takes a slot. Nutrition panels, back-of-pack copy—they become the gallery in the respondent's product popup. |
| 3D / AR | One model per product, in .glb. A model is replaced by dropping a new file over it—there's no delete control for the 3D slot. |
Marking a default is exclusive: starring a new image unstars the old one for you. Deleting the starred image leaves the product with no default—nothing inherits the star, so pick a new one.
💡 Tip: High-resolution PNGs with a transparent background work best. Sizes belong to the slot rather than to the image, so a photo moved into the main slot takes on the main slot's height and position—usually what you want on a shelf, but worth checking rather than assuming.
Product images pulled in by a marketplace import have their backgrounds removed automatically so they sit cleanly on a shelf. Anything you upload or drop in yourself is rendered exactly as you supplied it, including when you replace an imported product's photo with your own.
Updating Product Details
The right half of the card holds everything that isn't an image. Click any field to edit it.
At the top, the Purchasable / Display only toggle controls whether respondents can buy the product. Purchasable is on by default.
- Click the Product name field to add or edit the product name displayed in the survey editor.
- Click the Optional description field to add a description. Past 200 characters it shortens with a Show more link, so a wordy product doesn't push the rest of the card off screen.
- Click Regular price to add the price for the product, and Discounted price to add a discounted price. When a discounted price is listed, the price tags on the shelf update to reflect the discount.
- Click Units/package to update the units per package for each product.
- Select Max Stacking to set how many units may stack vertically at one facing. Select 1–4, or auto to stack as many as the shelf height allows.
Switch to Display only to put a product on the shelf that respondents can see but can't open or add to a cart. This is how display units, decoys, and promotional banners are built. It also hides the text and pricing fields in the card—your values are kept and come straight back when you switch Purchasable on again. Max Stacking stays visible either way, because a display-only position still occupies facings.
Display-only products can't be opened or added, so their rows on the Stats page read zero. They're still counted as chart rows rather than dropped from the report.
These are the caps you may actually hit.
| Field | Cap |
|---|---|
| Product name | 500 characters |
| Description | 10,000 characters |
| Regular price and Discounted price | 50 characters each |
| Units/package | 200 characters |
| Additional images | 6 per product, or 5 on a top-shelf fixture |
| Max Stacking | auto, or 1–4 |
Navigating Products in the Editor
- Click the product dropdown at the top of the card to open a list of the other products in the shelf test. Select an item from this list to open it in the Product Card.
- Use the Previous product and Next product arrows to move through the products in order.
The dropdown is labelled with each product's position and name. It leaves out the None of the above entry but numbers everything by its real position, so the visible sequence can skip a number. Next product stops at the last real product—because None of the above always sits last, the card stops before it rather than stepping over it.
There's no Save button. Typing saves shortly after you stop, and scaling, dragging, uploading, and starring save on the action itself. Closing the card discards nothing.
Colleagues with view-only access can open the card, browse every product through the dropdown and the arrows, and read every value. Every edit control is switched off, the Height field included.
Editing the Number of Product Facings on Your Shelf
- Hover over the empty space to the far right of each row to illuminate more options.
- Click on the Auto dropdown.
- Select the number of facings you would like for each respective product, or the amount of space it should take up on the shelf.
Click Preview to quickly view shelves and fine-tune product placement to fit your desired experience.
Facings for E-Commerce Shelves
With e-commerce, respondents will not see a virtual shelf, but rather a marketplace more akin to an online environment consisting of the product images, product names, prices, discounts, and a description if included in the Product Card.
Facings for Club Store Shelves (e.g., Costco, Sam's Club)
With shelving types based on club stores like Costco, you can create a pallet with product boxes and then add individual facings for the units on the shelf above. In the Product Card, the Main product image is the box that displays on the pallet. The Single product image is the unit that sits on the shelf above. Learn more about programming club shelves with logic in this article.
Pallet fixtures go up to three pallet sections, so you can build a six-pallet end-cap or aisle run. Existing two-section pallet questions carry over unchanged and render exactly as before.
Download Shelf Image
Once the Shelf Test is fully configured and customized, you can download the shelf image for your records or further use.
- Click Download Image above your product list. This will render the image and open it in a new browser tab.
- Right-click the image and select Save As to save to your device.