Channels are collections of similar stores that are bundled together to create a competitive market. For example, the Natural Expanded Channel is an aggregation of stores that sell a high percentage of natural goods than other retailers. One key feature of a properly constructed channel is that no one retailer is big enough to dominate or skew the channel’s data – users should not be able to pull out or isolate a single retailer in a channel’s dataset. Brands can use channel data to create insights about the growth of brands, items and trends in a marketplace, and retailers use channel data to compare their performance to the channel as a whole.