A method of allocating shelves includes obtaining shopping paths of customers in a supermarket, classifying the plurality of customers into a plurality of customer classes based on the shopping paths of the plurality of customers, determining one or more shopping paths adopted by more customers in the plurality of customer classes as frequent shopping paths of a class of customers of the plurality of customer classes, calculating a see-buy rate of a commodity for each of the plurality of customer classes based on shopping lists and the frequent shopping paths of the plurality of customers, calculating a location for a set of commodities when total expected benefits for the set of commodities are maximized during a certain period of time. The total expected benefits include a sum of an expected benefit for each commodity in the set of commodities based on the see-buy rate and the frequent shopping paths.