Retail conversion rate is the share of visitors who buy: transactions ÷ footfall, as a percentage. If 250 people enter a store and 50 of them buy something, conversion is 20%. While conversion is a standard measure in e-commerce, in physical retail it has been harder to measure because the denominator, footfall, was often missing or unreliable.
Conversion rate vs. Capture rate
Conversion rate isolates what happens between the door and the till. Capture rate measures whether the frontage brings people in. Conversion measures whether the store, the range, the service and the price turn them into customers. The two together cover the whole journey, and each points to a different team when it moves.
Why footfall accuracy is important
Conversion rate is only as good as its inputs. Transaction counts come from the point-of-sale system and are usually exact. Footfall counts need to be accurate, de-duplicated and consistently measured, or conversion drifts for reasons that have nothing to do with selling. A people counting system that double-counts people re-entering after a phone call makes conversion look worse than it is; a counter that misses groups makes it look better. The two counts also need to cover the same hours and the same doors.
Patterns in conversion are often more useful than the average. Tracking how conversion rate changes with store occupancy can uncover capacity issues - do customers abandon their purchase if the store is too busy? A store with high footfall and low conversion is a different problem from one with low footfall and high conversion, even if they take the same money.
Calculating conversion rate
Glimpse calculates conversion rate by combining footfall counts with transaction data from the retailer's POS system, either through a file import or a direct POS integration, and reports it alongside passer by counts, footfall and capture rate to give a full view of your conversion funnel.
