Retrieving Sales Data for Data Mining

Question

I am working on a data mining project that requires massive retail store sales data. Is such data available on the Internet? I tried Google, but all I had was some really sketchy datasets.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This can be quite difficult to find, as most companies find this information highly sensitive for competitive reasons.

One of the possibilities is to look at similar industries that actually publish large volumes of sales information - for example, you can get quite detailed notes at the box office for cinemas or details of the gates for sports events, etc.

If you have extra money, one company that sells a frankly scary amount of information is ebay:

• http://developer.ebay.com/programs/marketdata/

Answer 2

You can find something interesting in the links below:

http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/ , http://deeplearning.net/datasets/ , http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/ .

Answer 3

Someone already suggested http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/ , which is a great data source. Among the options - UCI Machine Learning Repository - an excellent resource for freely available datasets.

Hope this helps!