Is UK retail sales data good enough for institutional backtesting?

Yes for demand-series work. The ONS Retail Sales Bulletin delivers monthly value and volume indexes seasonally adjusted across roughly 34 store types from January 1988, free under the Open Government Licence v3.0 with commercial reuse permitted on attribution. Note it covers Great Britain only and republishes revised vintages, so point-in-time integrity needs archived editions.

Can I get Walmart price history through an API?

No. Walmart publishes no public API for its catalog, so history comes only from repeated collection of listings showing current and was-prices, unit pricing and clearance labels across hundreds of millions of items. Content is proprietary and the record advises reviewing Walmart's Terms of Use before automating collection.

Which broadline retail datasets are paid?

Exactly one of the nine primaries charges: the American Cement Association's Market Intelligence and Forecasts, selling Monitor Outlook Plus, the Annual Yearbook and Apparent Use reports with free samples. The other eight split between five entirely free sources and three freemium ones, NRF and APA among them.

Do broadline retail datasets offer machine-readable access?

One source does properly: Statistics Canada serves its ~8,750 quarterly construction price series through the WDS REST API plus 55 MB CSV bulk download under its Open Licence. Everything else ships as XLSX, HTML or PDF, or requires scraping proprietary storefront pages, so pipeline-friendly access is the exception in this industry.

Datadory notebook

How Investors & Quant Researchers Use Broadline Retail Data

Investors and quant researchers use broadline retail data as a cheap consumer-demand and price-signal layer: the UK ONS Retail Sales Bulletin back to January 1988, Statistics Canada's ~8,750 construction price series from 1981, NRF's 175 ranked retailers and realtime Walmart.com and Target.com pricing. Five of the nine primary datasets Datadory catalogs for the industry are free.

1,744 datasets. Pick your catch.

Ranked broadline retail datasets for investors and quants

Ranked by fit to investor and quant workflows, using Datadory catalog attributes as of August 2026: The full ranking follows in the table below.

Pick up where this leaves off

Every one of these ships with sample rows before you commit to anything.

Broadline Retail Great Britain

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Get a sample

How Investors & Quant Researchers Use Broadline Retail Data

Ranked broadline retail datasets for investors and quants

Pick up where this leaves off

UK ONS Retail Sales Bulletin - Great Britain

NRF Research & Insights (National Retail Federation)

AGC Construction Data Hub (Materials Prices, Employment, Spending, State Fact Sheets)

American Cement Association Market Intelligence and Forecasts

APA Engineered Wood Association Product and Market Data

The sample tray

Start here — the deepest field dictionaries in the catalog

Wyoming Statewide Time-Stamped Oil and Gas Activity, 1900-2020

BTS T-100 Data Tables Query Interface

Open Payments (Physician Payments Sunshine Act)

USAJOBS API Data

Steel Plates Faults (UCI)

AviationStack Flight & Airport API