Foot traffic describes how many people visit your retail store. It’s an essential part of retail analytics—footfall can indicate trends in customer behavior, help boost sales for a particular product through smarter positioning, and drive online shoppers towards your store to receive a more personalized experience from retail staff.
But the real question is: how do you get more passersby to actually enter your store? And how do you run a foot traffic analysis to determine whether your strategy is working?
Keep reading to learn how to count, track, and analyze foot traffic trends, and discover tools that make it easier than ever—no counters or spreadsheets required.
Foot traffic in retail is the number of customers who enter your store. Foot traffic numbers can either be monitored manually by using counters, or digitally using cameras and retail tracking software.
There are several factors that can impact your store’s foot traffic, most notably where it’s located. Is your store in an area where your target customer lives or frequently visits? Are there other nearby businesses or restaurants that attract customers who are also part of your target market?
💡 Tip: If you want to test foot traffic before committing to leasing a commercial space, consider opening a popup shop first to test the area. To open a popup shop and start selling with Shopify, go to your Shopify Admin, click the plus icon next to “Sales channels,” and select Point of Sale.
The more foot traffic data you have to interpret, the better equipped you are to spot patterns, measure your store’s performance, and make cost-effective decisions around labor and marketing.
For instance, you can determine what your store’s busiest days are based on both total sales and foot traffic and plan your staff schedule accordingly. You can also get more insight into how external factors (like weather) or your latest marketing activations and promotions impact foot traffic.
But perhaps most importantly, you can measure foot traffic levels next to the total number of orders you processed to see if your staff are turning opportunities into sales.
The benefits of tracking foot traffic work together to improve overall store performance through:
💡Tip: Shopify unifies order, customer, and inventory data to get a complete 360-degree view on retail performance. Monitor how customers move from online to offline channels, the impact of marketing campaigns, and view detailed inventory reports to make smarter decisions.
The first step to improving foot traffic is measuring it. Only by tracking foot-traffic trends over time can you identify how factors like seasonality or marketing activations impact store foot traffic.
Thankfully, there are plenty of great modern analytics tools to help calculate foot traffic and collect information about the customers who visit your brick-and-mortar store.
You can automatically gather in-store foot traffic intel with one of the following tools:
If you’re not quite ready to invest in software, start by keeping a tally of the number of people who enter your retail store each day. You can do this by manually jotting down the numbers in a notebook or using a tally or click counter. This method won’t give you the most accurate results, but it’s still a great place to start.
Foot-traffic data can help you schedule the right number of sales associates for your busy and slow times, track conversion rates alongside sales data, and ensure that your store is designed in a way that facilitates customer engagement.
Here’s what that might look like in practice:
You may think there are only offline strategies to increase foot traffic, but more and more retailers are blurring the lines between physical and digital customer experiences to boost sales and foot traffic.
Here are a few ways to increase foot traffic using online and offline tactics:
An omnichannel approach promotes your brick-and-mortar store through other sales channels like your ecommerce website, marketplace listings, and social media storefront. But creating an online store is just the tip of the iceberg.
Make the most of a strong online presence to increase foot traffic by:
💡Tip: Shopify is the only platform to natively unify POS and ecommerce on the same platform. Customers get the same seamless experience wherever they prefer to shop, while you get one centralized operating system to streamline operations. An independent research study found this unified approach reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by 22% on average.
Invite customers to in-store events that introduce new products and demos, as well as celebrate anniversaries, holidays, or customer loyalty. Events also increase engagement with your customer base, as it gives you the chance to interact with them face to face in a social setting.
Luggage brand BÉIS applies this concept to popup shops. They recently hosted a “BÉIS wash” event, where existing customers could bring in their bags for a professional clean.
CEO Adeela Hussain Johnson says as a result of these IRL experiences, “We see an average 30% increase in traffic during pop-up activation and an average revenue lift of 10%.” Customers acquired through the retail activation also have a 20% higher 12-month long-term value (LTV).
Visual merchandising describes how you display items around the store, including product displays, mannequins, and window displays. For example, placing bestselling products at the front of the store can attract passersby who see them from the street, while eye-catching window displays turn heads and drive foot traffic.
From sidewalk signs to Instagrammable artwork, creative and sometimes humorous window displays can also help draw in more foot traffic. And if customers take photos and share them on social media, it’s a win-win: You’ll have enticed them to come in, and received more online exposure for your retail store.
Developing a retail merchandising strategy in tandem with your plans for store design will help you make the most of floor space to improve traffic flow. It will also help you plan new product drops and implement cross-merchandising strategies to increase cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
Here are some additional tips to maximize foot traffic through store layout and design:
Essential oil brand NEOM, for example, displays samples of their bestselling products in-store. The scent alone is enough to draw in passersby. Once they’re in, they can “try before they buy” and find a scent they love.
Being located in a high foot traffic area doesn’t guarantee success. You’ll need to find ways to win over foot traffic from other retailers and make enough sales to justify the higher rent you’re likely paying to set up shop in a high traffic zone.
While you’re looking for a commercial space, take note of the types of retailers that are already in the area. If you sell activewear and there’s already a boutique that sells fitness clothing, it could be an indication that you will reach your target audience. But if your products are too similar, you run the risk of losing business to the store that already has a loyal customer base.
In-store exclusives can increase foot traffic during slow periods or when you need to liquidate inventory. Even if customers don’t make it to your event, your marketing efforts will still be beneficial for brand awareness.
That could include special offers such as:
Jewelry retailer Little Words Project, for example, unifies customer data inside Shopify—something the brand uses to invite VIP customers back in-store. “We’re using data we’re getting from Shopify to attract customers near particular stores for exclusive beading experiences and appreciation events,” says Martin Hogan, director of stores.
This creates a continuous loop of personalized outreach. As Hogan explains, “If you’ve had a great experience at our beading table or if you tell us a special story, we can follow up with you.”
Modern order fulfillment options such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup let you create a seamless online-to-offline shopping experience that also boosts customer satisfaction.
The added benefit: When a customer comes to your store to pick up their order, they will likely take a quick look around and could wind up buying more products, leading to more revenue.
💡Tip: Enable in-store pickup availability in Shopify admin to show online shoppers whether a product is available for pickup at one of your stores.
Combat rising customer acquisition costs by inviting previous shoppers back in-store through a POS loyalty program. As an extra incentive to shop in-store instead of online, offer to increase the value of loyalty points on retail purchases. For example, they could earn 5 points for every dollar spent in-store, compared to 1 point online.
Host events in partnership with other local businesses to increase your reach and bring customers in-store. Those retailers will also promote the event via social media, email marketing, and word of mouth, driving increased foot traffic to your store.
If you have extra square footage that you’re not using in-store, take your partnership strategy a step further by hosting a shop-in-shop experience. Invite the partner to display their products within your space and have their team drive their own audience towards your location. They’ll likely add your products to their basket during their visit.
All retail stores must be accessible by law, but making it easier and more convenient to visit can drive foot traffic to your store and away from competitors who don’t.
Simple tips to improve the retail customer experience and create an inclusive store include:
Whether you start small by reviewing surveillance recordings or dive right into using advanced tracking software, understanding what brings customers in-store and how they move through your shop will help you make the most of this important metric that ultimately affects the success of your retail business strategy.
Shopify is on hand to not only collect and unify your data, but make sense of what that data shows. All of your most important information flows back to one central operating system, making it easier to answer questions like: Did that marketing campaign drive foot traffic? Has revenue increased since we refreshed our window displays?
Foot traffic and footfall essentially refer to the same concept—the number of people entering a retail store. Both retail metrics help you understand customer visits, monitor in-store behavior, and measure store performance.
Foot traffic measures how many people visit a store, while conversion rate shows the percentage of those visitors who make a purchase. High foot traffic doesn’t guarantee high sales; the conversion rate reveals how effectively that footfall is turning into revenue.
A “good” foot traffic number depends on your retail store’s size, location, industry, and day of the week. For example, a small boutique might see 100 or 200 visitors per day, while a busy mall store could record over 1,000 per day over the weekend.
Measure the ROI of foot traffic initiatives by comparing the cost of your efforts to the revenue it generates. For example, if a retailer spends $500 on a weekend promotion that brings in 200 extra visitors, and 25% of them make a $40 purchase, the ROI would be 300%.
