Canadian Retailer - Holiday 2016 - 9
PARTNER MESSAGE HEADCOUNT TRAFFIC TROUBLE Store Traffic is down-what are retailers doing about it? BY MARK RYSKI, Founder and CEO of HeadCount BY any measure, empirical or anecdotal, the number of people visiting retail stores is down. There are plenty of theories about why: it's the mass movement of shoppers to online; it's changing consumer preferences; it's the weather; it's those pesky, hard-tofigure-out millennials. It's a combination of all of these things. As someone who has studied brick-and-mortar store traffic trends for more than 20 years, I know it's not unusual to see year-over-year store traffic declines of 5 per cent, 10 per cent and even 20 per cent or more. When you put this in absolute terms, it can be startling. It's even more concerning for retailers that don't have traffic count data to analyze, because without data, they are literally flying blind. Or worse, they use sales transaction counts as a proxy for store traffic, so they think they know what their store traffic is when they actually do not. There is a profound difference between transaction counts and traffic counts. Using transaction counts as a proxy for store traffic will lead to wrong conclusions, bad decisions and poor results. www.retailcouncil.org/cdnretailer All retailers know that store traffic and store sales are connected. But store traffic is only one piece of the retail sales puzzle. And with the proper data and analytic tools, there's a lot retailers can do to improve results despite lower store traffic. To learn more, read 5 Things Retailers Need to Do to Thrive in a Declining Store Traffic World', at www.headcount.com/traffictrouble. If your store traffic is down and you'd like to find out what to do about it-or you are curious about how much more you could be doing with the traffic you do get, drop us a line at talk@headcount.com. We'd be delighted to talk to you. THE LOSS PREVENTION ISSUE | CANADIAN RETAILER | 9
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