Footfall, attraction and conversion; a retail empirical generalisation

The three critical measures of retail performance are often suggested to be “location, location, location”. However this generalisation, like many others in the literature, is of little practical use without underpinning empirical evidence. We report replications from mass observations of shopping behaviour in two categories, covering eight brands, competing in four location types and two countries. Our aim was to identify predictable behavioural norms between the key retail metrics; footfall density, shopper attraction and shopper conversion. Such evidence-based relationships, empirical generalisations, would then imply that the one number that matters is footfall, tentatively quantifying the retailers’ mantra. Our replications revealed surprising systematic regularities. Despite great differences in multiple conditions (base footfall, timings, brands, trading locations, frontage) attraction rates remained close to 4% for each competing outlet with an average conversion rate of 43%. Attraction patterns conformed to the well-known Law of Double Jeopardy (McPhee, 1963; Ehrenberg, Goodhardt & Barwise, 1990), such that higher share brands attracted slightly more shoppers into store. Double Jeopardy was not so clear in the conversion ratio. Results therefore suggest a law-like relationship between footfall and retail sales that can be usefully applied in a wide range of circumstances.