The advantages of an integral approach to assessing the competitiveness of retailers are substantiated, which allows obtaining a more thorough and versatile informative base for making further managerial decisions to ensure the development of trading business. A new approach to the integral evaluation of the competitiveness of retailers is developed. The list of functional and structural components of competitiveness was substantiated: marketing,financial and investment, material and technical, intellectual and personnel,innovation, logistic and social. It is proposed to use the methodological sequence of competitiveness assessment, which involves the alternate passage of the following stages: construction of an evaluation hierarchy, identification of the levels of the criterion importance, definition of a set of “local vectors” by evaluation criteria, conducting comparative evaluation of competing enterprises, hierarchical synthesis of alternative options for ensuring competitiveness. The methods of an expert survey are used to form an information and analytical base. Using the Saaty’s analytic hierarchy process and the Delphi method of an expert survey, a matrix of pairwise comparisons of the criteria of the retailers’ competitiveness is formed. The Gallup Institute methodology is used to form the sample of enterprises. A matrix of rating positions of the socially-oriented retailers is developed to enable evaluation.On the basis of the obtained results – analytical support of the policy(regarding the competitiveness level, state of security and coefficients of weight of its functional and structural components), the strategic principles of managing the competitiveness of socially-oriented retailers. A matrix of strategic decisions on managing the competitiveness of socially-oriented retailers is developed.