TradeLab
TradeLab is an Italian publisher of proprietary market intelligence, geomarketing and analytics platforms for out-of-home, retail, pharmacy and public-sector organisations. It pairs descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analysis with consulting, and sells strictly by contract.
What is TradeLab?
TradeLab is a Milan research house that turned itself into a software publisher. Tradelab S.p.A. was entered in the Italian companies register on 25 March 1999, founded by university professors from the Cescom, the retail studies centre of Bocconi University in Milan, and has been listed on Euronext Growth Milan since 29 May 2025 (ticker TRAI.MI, ISIN IT0005651507). Its admission release describes the company as a reference point in Italy for trade marketing, retail and channel management, with business analytics tools and customer platforms built on artificial intelligence.
The offer reads on two axes. Four Industries, namely Away From Home, Retail and Real Estate, Pharma and Healthcare, and Public Administration and Territorial Marketing, meet four Soluzioni: Consulting, Geomarketing, Market Intelligence, and Platforms and Technologies. The last of these is the software ecosystem, developed in house and delivered ready to use on a web platform the company presents as customisable.
The named platforms are OnTheMap for geomarketing, AFH Business Discovery for business intelligence, AFH Consumer Tracking and AFH Future Tracking for consumption behaviour and forecasting, QueryLab for pharmacist surveys, In-Store Marketing Compliance for promotional measurement, Tool Assortment Optimisation for category management, TradeLab Digital Desk for municipal grant administration, and Knowledge Hub, a market intelligence library of more than thirty structured studies alongside multi-client research and custom analysis.
Two of them show the depth. OnTheMap Geo AFH maps roughly 375,000 Italian consumption points, from bars, restaurants and nightlife venues to takeaways, patisseries and ice cream shops, hotels and chains, each carrying its channel, segment and an attractiveness indicator, with pedestrian flow analysis by season and time slot, on Google Cloud and Google Maps. Tool Assortment Optimisation processes a retailer's transactional and loyalty data in real time, identifies need states from recurring associations between products, issues recommendations by store format or assortment cluster, and simulates the expected impact before implementation.
On artificial intelligence the company's own vocabulary is algoritmi di intelligenza aumentata, augmented intelligence, and proprietary digital solutions based on AI, covering descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analysis. TradeLab reports 2024 revenue of EUR 5.9 million, up 78 percent on 2018, a platform business model since 2019, around 80 Distretti del Commercio projects in 2025 and 75 employees on its company LinkedIn page. Everything is sold by contract.
What it does
- Map and download roughly 375,000 Away From Home consumption points across Italy.
- Estimate consumption value and sell-in by catchment area, municipality or province.
- Optimise a category assortment from transactional and loyalty data, with impact simulation before rollout.
- Prioritise territories by analysing pedestrian flows of tourists and residents, by season and time slot.
- Forecast Away From Home footfall trends and market value by Food and Beverage category.
- Collect insights from pharmacists through digital surveys and measure the effectiveness of in-pharmacy promotions.
- Run a municipal call for projects online end to end, from submission to publication of results.
When to use TradeLab / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if TradeLab is the right fit.
When to use TradeLab
- Food and beverage manufacturers and distributors in the Away From Home channel who need to size a market that conventional panels cover poorly.
- Grocery retail chains rebuilding a category assortment from their own transactional and loyalty data, with impact simulation before rollout.
- Pharmaceutical companies and consumer health players steering pharmacy distribution and in-store promotional activity.
- Italian municipalities and local authorities administering calls for projects, grants and Distretti del Commercio programmes.
- Sales and trade marketing leaders who want fine-grained territory mapping to plan routes and sales areas, and who prefer one contract covering both the research partner and the software.
When not to use TradeLab
- Teams expecting self-service: there is no online sign-up, no trial and no published price, and every product page ends in a contact form.
- Organisations operating outside Italy: the data coverage of consumption points, pharmacies and municipalities is Italian, and no foreign dataset is claimed beyond one international comparison in the AFH Outlook study.
- Non-Italian speakers: the site and the published material exist in Italian only, and the /en/ path simply serves the Italian page.
- Developers and technical teams looking for a public API, a mobile app or a browser extension, none of which exist.
- Buyers who want a standalone software licence: the consulting engagements and multi-client studies are services, and Knowledge Hub explicitly places itself outside the field of consulting.
How to use TradeLab
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Identify which platform matches your need: the offer is organised by industry (Away From Home, Retail and Real Estate, Pharma and Healthcare, Public Administration and Territorial Marketing) and by solution.
- Read the relevant product page. There is no public sign-up route, so the entry point is the contact form at the bottom of each product page.
- Complete that form: first name, last name, company or organisation, area of interest, email, telephone, message, acceptance of the privacy policy and a captcha.
- Or take another published channel: call +39 02 799061 or write to tradelab@tradelab.it.
- On the Digital Desk page, start instead from the hours-saved calculator offered as an entry point.
- Wait for the routing: the Contatti page states that the request is directed to the most appropriate person and answered shortly.
- Scope the engagement with the team, since perimeter, contract terms and pricing are all handled off the website.
- Prepare the data you will have to supply. Tool Assortment Optimisation runs on the retailer's own transactional and loyalty data.
- Have the tool configured: the platforms are delivered ready to use on an accessible web platform and customised by format, assortment cluster or perimeter.
- Feed the output into your teams' processes in marketing, sales, research or public administration. OnTheMap is declared integrable with sales management tools, with no vendor named.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Long-standing presence on the Italian market, the company having been registered on 25 March 1999, with verifiable continuity since.
- Listed on Euronext Growth Milan, so accounts, governance and press releases are public.
- Depth of proprietary data, with roughly 375,000 Away From Home consumption points mapped across Italy.
- Unusual combination of a research firm and a software publisher within the same contract.
- Tools presented as ready to use and customisable, with continuity of updates announced.
- Recurring revenue is put forward on the home page as a share of 2024 revenue, and the company obtained PMI Innovativa status on 23 June 2026.
- An accessibility statement is published under Directive (EU) 2019/882 with a reporting mechanism, and the Data Protection Officer is named and reachable.
Cons
- No public pricing whatsoever: no pricing page, no rate card and not even an order of magnitude across the fourteen pages collected.
- No free trial and no free plan is mentioned anywhere.
- No public API: /api, /api/v1, /api/health and /openapi.json all return the site's genuine 404 and no technical subdomain exists; there is no mobile app and no extension either.
- Italian only, the /en/ path serving the Italian page byte for byte.
- No security certification is published (ISO 27001, SOC 2) and the subject is never raised; the use of customer data for model training is never addressed in either direction.
- No terms and conditions and no dedicated legal notice page; the privacy policy is hosted by a third party, iubenda.
- No screenshot and no public demonstration of the platforms, and the accessibility statement itself reports only partial WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, with acknowledged gaps on PDF documents.
Pricing & Plans
No price is published. There is no free plan and no free trial, and neither is announced: across the whole website there is no pricing page, no rate card and no order of magnitude for any platform, so no lowest price point can be stated. Access is sold by contract, the buyer going through the contact form on each product page and selecting an area of interest, with pricing agreed off the website. The amounts that do appear on the site relate to the company's own finances and are in no sense product prices: share capital of EUR 268,041.30, historical revenue of EUR 2.2 million in 2008, EUR 3.3 million in 2018 and EUR 5.9 million in 2024, and a regional grant of EUR 600,000 out of a EUR 1,204,000 total.
- the site names no tier
- no package and no subscription.
- Consulting
- Geomarketing
- Market Intelligence
- and Platforms and Technologies.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how TradeLab handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR is applied in substance but never claimed. The privacy policy is hosted on iubenda, written in Italian and last amended on 9 July 2026. It carries a dedicated rights section: withdrawal of consent, objection, access, verification and rectification, restriction, erasure, portability and complaint to a supervisory authority. Requests are free of charge, addressed to the controller through the contacts in the document, and answered within one month at the latest. Additional sections cover users in the European Union, Switzerland, Brazil and the United States (CCPA/CPRA and equivalent state rights), and a Data Protection Officer is named and reachable. What is missing is any explicit statement of compliance: the publisher never writes that it is GDPR compliant. As a company established in Italy it needs no Article 27 representative, and none is designated. No data processing agreement is published.
Who owns the data?
Tradelab S.p.A., Via Marco d'Aviano 2, 20131 Milan (C.F./P.I. 12708570150), is named as the data controller, reachable at tradelab@tradelab.it and by certified mail at tradelab@pec.tradelab.it. A Data Protection Officer is designated and named: Andrea Maria Mazzaro, at a.mazzaro@asana.legal. That privacy policy, however, covers the website only, and says nothing about ownership of the customer data processed inside the platforms. Product pages state that the analyses run on the retailer's own transactional and loyalty data, but no ownership, licence or reuse clause is published anywhere, and there are no terms and conditions to fall back on.
Reuse rights
The declared purposes are limited to providing the service, meeting legal obligations, answering enquiries, protecting the controller's rights and detecting fraudulent activity. Tracking tools are disclosed, including Google Analytics 4, Google Conversion Linker and other measurement and retargeting services, with an advertising opt-out available. Access is restricted to the controller and, where relevant, to people within the site's organisation (administrative, sales, marketing and legal staff) appointed as processors. Processing is described as carried out by IT and telematic means, with security measures against unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration and destruction. Nothing is said, in either direction, about reusing customer data to train AI models, and since no terms of service are published, no reuse right is granted to the end user.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting country and no region is declared for the platforms. The privacy policy uses a generic formula: data is processed at the controller's operating offices and at any other place where the parties involved in the processing are located. It warns that data may be transferred to a country other than the user's own and refers the reader to the controller for detail. No jurisdiction, no data centre and no region is named. Two facts are easy to misread. The named third-party services (Google LLC) process in the United States, but that is the processing location of a subprocessor of the website, not a statement about where the platforms are hosted. Likewise the site itself resolves to 15.160.43.159, an AWS instance in eu-south-1 (Milan), which is the corporate website's infrastructure and says nothing about the platforms. OnTheMap is declared to run on Google Cloud and Google Maps, with no region indicated. Anyone with a data residency requirement will have to obtain the answer contractually: it is not published, and no data processing agreement is offered.
Where TradeLab works
Country-level availability.
Available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting TradeLab.
- This is a portfolio publisher rather than a single product: at least nine named platforms and solutions coexist, each with its own perimeter, so one directory entry necessarily aggregates them. Check which one you are actually buying.
- Ownership and reuse of the customer data fed into the platforms is never addressed. The privacy policy covers the website only, no terms and conditions exist, and the published list of third-party services covers the site (Google Analytics and the like), not the platforms.
- Whether customer data is used to train models is never stated, in either direction: there is nothing to opt out of and nothing declared unavailable.
- Corporate control may change. An unsolicited voluntary exchange offer by Metriks AI on TradeLab was announced on 30 July 2026, with a shareholders' agreement signed the same day.
- Company age is not product age. The company was registered on 25 March 1999 and the domain in 2000, but the platform business model only began in 2019, so the 1999 date does not date the AI platforms.
- Treat assortment and territory recommendations as decision support, not as decisions. The vendor's own vocabulary is augmented intelligence, and the impact figures are simulations produced before implementation, not measured outcomes; a team that stops questioning them loses the category judgement it used to exercise.
- Some published figures cannot be verified or reconciled: the home page growth and recurring revenue counters are animated and render as zero in the static HTML, and share capital differs across sources (EUR 268,041.30 in the site footer against EUR 156,964.29 in the May 2025 releases). Note also that Google Cloud and Google Maps are the underlying technology of OnTheMap, not integrations a customer can switch on.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Undemanding technically, demanding organisationally. There is no self-service: setup starts with a sales contact and a scoping phase. The tools are described as ready to use on an accessible web platform, with no client-side installation, but customisation by format, assortment cluster or perimeter implies a guided configuration. The real difficulty lies in the data, since Tool Assortment Optimisation requires the retailer to supply its own transactional and loyalty data. OnTheMap advertises possible integration with sales management tools without naming a connector. Expect no technical documentation, no installation guide and no public API.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind TradeLab
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Who publishes these platforms?
How much does TradeLab cost?
Is there a free trial or a free plan?
Is there an API?
Is there a mobile app?
Which languages are available?
What is the geographic coverage?
Which platforms make up the portfolio?
Who should be contacted about personal data?
Where is the data hosted?
Should you pick TradeLab?
TradeLab is a research house that became a software publisher. Founded in Milan in 1999 by academics from Bocconi's Cescom, it moved to a platform business model in 2019 and listed on Euronext Growth Milan in 2025. That trajectory shows in the product: nine named platforms, each narrow in scope, sitting on proprietary Italian datasets that took two decades to build.
Its main strength is that depth, together with the fact that a single contract can buy both the study and the tool. Roughly 375,000 mapped Away From Home consumption points, transactional and loyalty analysis with impact simulation, pharmacist survey panels and a municipal grant desk are not things you assemble from generic analytics software. The company names a Data Protection Officer, publishes an accessibility statement and, being listed, files accounts anyone can read.
The main limitation is just as clear: total pricing opacity and no self-service route of any kind. Nothing on the site says what anything costs, and there is no trial, no demo, no screenshot and no API. Every path leads to a contact form, in Italian. Anyone outside Italy, or unwilling to hold a sales conversation before seeing the product, should look elsewhere.
One reservation deserves flagging: an unsolicited voluntary exchange offer by Metriks AI on TradeLab was announced on 30 July 2026, alongside a shareholders' agreement signed the same day. Control of the publisher may change.
The natural audience is easy to name: sales, marketing and category management teams in Italian food and beverage, retail and pharma, plus municipal administrations. For them TradeLab is a credible partner. For everyone else, the language, the geography and the sales model will settle the question long before the features do.
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