How busy is your store, and why does it matter?

1 min read
Feb 27, 2018

How busy is your store at any given time? How does this change, and how does it affect your conversion ratio? These are basic questions that every retailer has to ask, but until now they have been surprisingly difficult questions to answer, even for retailers with a comprehensive people counting solution.

Although there are differences, for several years the two most popular technologies for people counting in retail have been thermal and stereo video. Across most standard environments, both deliver similar performance and can deliver comparable data.

Normally retailers use either the ‘in’ or ‘out’ count to measure the conversion ratio in their store. Calculating ‘occupancy’, a measure of the number of people in the store at any one moment, is surprisingly difficult. Even for a sensor with a very high count accuracy even a small difference in accuracy between the ‘in’ and’ out count can lead to an error in the occupancy measurement (the difference between in and out count) that accumulates over time. Eventually this can make the measurement of occupancy useless.

But with new technology, like the time of flight (ToF) sensor in the Irisys Vector 4D, with an accuracy of up to 99.5%, getting a true and accurate measure of store occupancy is now a realistic option, and one that opens up a new range of analytics possibilities.

Occupancy delivers a better measure of how busy a store is compared to a simple in/out count of footfall, as it fails to capture the full range of behaviours exhibited by customers. Some come in and leave very quickly, others stay for longer – how does this affect how you interact with them? Even if more people are entering the store, is this affecting your conversion ratio? If not, why not?

For the modern retailer to adapt and thrive new technologies and new ways of optimising store operations are needed, and Vector 4D is perfectly positioned to meet these needs.

Occupancy Business Case

Connect with us

Need more information? Ready to get started? We're here to help, get in touch.