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The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
To create an ecosystem that connects leaders of all kinds – industry, community, student, educational, civic, investment and entrepreneurial – to help overcome Omnichannel Retail barriers through exclusive, insight-rich content.
The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
Ep. 117 - Stop Guessing: Let Traffic Data Lead Retail Strategy
Ever wonder why some stores convert browsers into buyers while others struggle despite decent foot traffic? This eye-opening conversation with Mark Ryski, founder of HeadCount Corporation and author of Store Traffic is a Gift, reveals how retailers and brands are missing a massive opportunity hiding in plain sight.
At its core, store traffic represents the ultimate denominator and demand signal for physical retail. Yet surprisingly, only about half of retailers today actually track it properly, instead relying on transaction counts that miss crucial insights about non-buying visitors. Mark explains why this oversight leads to misaligned staffing, missed conversion opportunities, and ultimately, lost sales.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when Mark reveals how dramatically conversion rates can vary within the same retail chain – from as low as 30% to as high as 75%. These "super converting" stores hold the secrets to chainwide improvement, offering practical lessons that can be replicated across locations. For brands and suppliers, understanding traffic patterns provides leverage when negotiating promotional opportunities and helps quantify the true exposure their products receive.
Perhaps most compelling is Mark's perspective on friction in the shopping journey. While retailers endlessly discuss the importance of reducing friction, most lack effective methods to measure it. Conversion rates provide that measurement, highlighting exactly when and where customers abandon their shopping journey. By tracking hourly traffic and conversion, retailers can pinpoint precisely when friction occurs and take targeted action to address it.
For anyone involved in physical retail – whether you're managing stores, developing products, or analyzing performance – this conversation will transform how you think about traffic data and its strategic value. Tune in to discover practical ways to treat traffic as the precious gift it truly is and unlock the full potential of your physical retail presence.
Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Digital Front Door. I'm Scott Benedict. Today's episode is going to take us right to the heart of physical retail, which is a bit of an anomaly for us when we are usually talking about omnichannel, but I think you'll see, through today's conversation, a connection between physical and digital retail will really become obvious, and we're excited for the topic that we're going to talk about today. Physical retail uncovers a massive and often overlooked opportunity hiding in plain sight for both retailers and brands, and that is store traffic understanding what's happening with store traffic. Joining me today is Mark Riske.
Speaker 1:Mark is the founder and CEO of Headcount Corporation. Mark is also a three-time author and is one of the most respected voices on shopper Traffic and Conversion Analytics. His latest book is entitled Store Traffic is a Gift, and it redefines really how we should think about the role of traffic in driving retail performance, and not just as a KPI, but really as a strategic asset. And this is becoming more important as we think about the interconnected activity between what happens in a digital platform and what happens in stores and the connectivity between the two. And so, whether you're a supplier trying to understand in-store performance, or perhaps you're a broker managing multiple clients or a retail executive trying to understand some of the data that you have in front of you. Clearly, one of the things I'm excited about is Mark's insights really offer a practical and powerful lens of what's working and what isn't working in stores today. And, mark, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the broadcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, scott. Great setup and it's a pleasure to be here with you on your podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to have you here. I think this topic that we're going to talk about really is under-discussed, under-analyzed and certainly not fully understood by a lot of folks across the ecosystem of retail, so I'm excited to talk about it. Alan, maybe start with the big idea behind your book. You say in the title of the book that store traffic is a gift. What caused you to have that perspective and why write that book at this time in the history of retail?
Speaker 2:Well thanks, scott. Store traffic is a gift, yeah. So let me just start by saying this you know, store traffic and shopper conversion is like the cornflakes of retail analytics. You know they've been around forever. Electronic traffic counting really started in the 1970s. Okay, so there's nothing new and fantastical about the idea of counting traffic. In fact, retailers intuitively understand the importance of traffic. But that all said, if they want so much traffic and retailers want traffic then they should measure it and they should understand their conversion rates. And I, you know, I've been doing this work now for 22 years, dedicated to doing store traffic and conversion analytics for 22 years, and in the post pandemic world, I believe this idea of store traffic and conversion has changed, and so I felt it was really important to update the ideas and really apply the thinking to how retailers need to retail today in a post-pandemic world, and that was really the motivation for writing store traffic as a gift.
Speaker 1:And that makes sense and you know it feels like and you argue this and I happen to agree that store traffic is one of the most overlooked assets in retail today. I've known a number of retailers who view traffic in transaction counts and for those of us from a digital background, that you're not counting all the people that you had in the store, you just the ones that that made purchases, and that really you miss a part of the picture, certainly if you don't understand conversion, whether that's in the digital context or the physical store context. I'm curious can you explain how traffic tells a broader story of what's happening inside a store, not only for the retailer, but perhaps for their brand partners as well, that's for their brand partners as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, you know. A retail exec that introduced me at a recent conference for my talk said it, I think, brilliantly when he said store traffic is the ultimate denominator to which you compare everything that goes on in your physical store too. So how many BOPUS orders did you process based on the visits that you had? How many transactions did you have? What was your conversion rate? Did the marketing drive traffic into the store?
Speaker 2:And if you're a brand, you're going to perhaps want to know what the conversion rate of your individual SKUs are. And so the challenge, scott, is that historically, retailers have focused on the transactional outcomes. The sales tell you everything, and there's been this implicit belief that traffic equals sales. And while it's true that you can't make a sale without traffic, the fact of the matter is, when you study this data, as I have, and when you look at it, what you realize is more traffic could actually lead to lower sales, less traffic, you can deliver higher sales. And so you really need to understand what's going on. And traffic is not only the ultimate denominator, it's the ultimate demand signal for what's going on in physical stores the ultimate demand signal for what's going on in physical stores.
Speaker 1:Indeed, and one of the metrics that was taught to me during my time in digital retail that I think has application, is this concept of qualified versus unqualified traffic. In other words, it's great to have a lot of visitors to a website, just like it is to a store, but if it's not the true consumer that you're trying to reach, who you think has a likelihood or an inclination to buy, more doesn't equal better. To your point. One of the things that we often explore on this podcast is this concept of friction, things that are sticking points to ultimately making a purchase, whether that's hitting a buy button on a website or actually traveling through the register and checking out at a physical store, and one of the things, as I mentioned earlier, is typically a disconnect between sales data and actual performance. Is this concept of conversion rate, and I'm wondering, wondering from your perspective how can classic analytics clarify or even maybe correct some misperceptions about how effective an individual store is or how a retailer is performing across their chain?
Speaker 2:or how are retailers performing across their chain? Terrific question, and this idea of friction is a favorite one for me. I love the idea of retailers thinking about friction in their stores and what they can do differently to minimize friction. And let me expand on this idea of friction. It's why aren't people buying, is another way to say it. Okay, now, retailers are often too polite because they don't want to say we're just trying to make a sale, because some say that's too transactional, to which I say what are you solving for then, if you're not transactional? But let me, let me. Let me answer with a question, and that is retailers talk about friction in their stores a lot, but, scott, you tell me how do they measure friction? What is it that they? How do they know there's friction, where is that friction and how do they quantify that friction?
Speaker 1:Right. Well, I think in the context of digital retail it's used that visual conversion funnel, which is steps in the process between consideration to actual purchase and where do you lose a customer on that journey. And it feels like there's similar corollaries in a physical retail setting. Where, where are there points in the shopping journey where you you start to lose someone and what? What can you do to eliminate those points of friction? Is that the right way to think about it?
Speaker 2:100% and you hit it on the head. The measure of friction is conversion rates. You need to understand your conversion rates. If you have traffic in your store, shoppers in your store, but conversion rates are low, that means there's friction. And when you actually track hourly traffic and calculate hourly conversion rates, what tends to happen is you see it show up as a big dip in conversion rates, and while store traffic and conversion data can't tell you why that's occurring, it can pinpoint literally to the hours of the day when it's occurring, and so if a retailer is armed with that information and, importantly, their store team is armed with that information they're in a far better position to do something about it. Like try and understand well, why is this friction occurring? Oh, we see that we only have one till open between 3 and 5 pm on Tuesdays and we can see a big dip in conversion rates. Let's open a second till and study what the conversion rates are after that to see if it made a difference. So conversion is the ultimate friction metric.
Speaker 1:And you know, one of the things you and I talked about previously and it occurred to me while you were talking is that one of the things, as someone who grew up in the general merchandise side of retail, that I always respected about folks that come from the grocery side of retail is grocers tended to understand times of the day and when shoppers were shopping in their weekly grocery trip or even just for a fill-in, and they understood how they had to make sure that displays, particularly a fresh product, were right at 5 pm on a typical weekday, because that's when people were coming in after work on a typical weekday, because that's when people were coming in after work.
Speaker 1:And I think that's my go-to example of understanding times of the day and where not only is staffing an issue to the point that you've made, but how effective and fresh, if you will, your display of merchandise, your in-stock, the availability of shopping carts and things of that nature to make sure you're ready to serve a customer at certain day parts and not lose them to your point. Is that one of the ways, maybe, to think about those different points of friction in the purchase process?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's absolutely correct. If you know when people are coming in and you know when the conversion rates are, in particular, there's so many decisions that you're going to make. Well, first and foremost, how you're going to schedule your frontline team, how much labor you're going to put in a store, you know, is the marketing driving traffic? Are there bottlenecks in conversion rates, and what kinds of things may be causing that?
Speaker 2:Grocery is an interesting category because it's one of the few where transactions are a reasonably good proxy for store traffic, because virtually everyone that goes in and buys, and so I think grocery retailers, in some ways, have been mining this data well ahead of other physical retailers for a long time. However, I would also argue that grocery retailers are fast becoming general merchandisers that are selling all kinds of products, and I suspect that if you were to track conversion rates in grocery stores over time, say 10 years ago to today, I think you would find conversion rates are actually declining because you are having people coming in looking for flowers or gifts or other things, may not find them and leave without buying, and so I think traffic and conversion now actually has a meaningful place, even on the dashboards of grocery retailers.
Speaker 1:Indeed, and in fact, if ever, it might be more important today because many of those retailers to your point are now moving beyond just grocery into other complementary categories and complementary transactions. So you've kind of brought up your view of what conversion means, so that you're ready to serve a customer in different shopping scenarios, not just the traditional grocery shopping trip, right? Okay, so I'm curious, because a number of the viewers and listeners to our broadcast are breakers. They're consumer brands or they're sales teams that call on Walmart, Sam's Club or other retailers, and I'm curious from your perspective, how should those teams be thinking differently about store traffic and perhaps what questions should they be asking their retail partners or trying to gain a better understanding about so they can do their job better and be more effective in what they do in partnering with a retailer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question there too, in regards to the suppliers and the brands. Retailers are putting pressure on brands to help pay not only good, old-fashioned end caps and slotting fees, but now retail media networks and all kinds of pressure on brands to contribute financially. And they're starting to push back, in part because they're saying, look, we're making these investments but we're not seeing the impact and sell-through of our SKUs or of our product, seeing the impact and sell through of our SKUs, of our product. And so, look, I was doing this kind of thing 20 years ago without a retail media network. I was merely going to my vendors. I worked in retail, in marketing in particular, and I would go to my vendors and I would say, look, our store is going to get this much traffic here. I'll show you what kind of exposure this end cap is going to get. I can't guarantee what the sell-through is going to get, just like a magazine or any other media platform cannot guarantee a sale, but I can at least tell you what kind of exposure you're going to get. So that's part A, and I don't think you need a retail media network for that.
Speaker 2:Brands can be asking any of their retailers tell me what kind of circulation or exposure I should expect to get, and I'll tell you, when I started doing that, over 20 years well, 30 years ago, sorry, when I actually worked in retail my media reps and brands were really shocked. Well, the brands I worked with are really surprised by this and they were saying look, you know, mark, nobody none of the other retailers we work with provide anything like this. So because you're providing us with circulation or exposure numbers based on your store traffic, I can make a case to my leadership to get the funding to support your efforts. And so I think retailers should have an obligation of brands to say hey, we want some of your money, we want you to help support our efforts. Here's what you're going to get. You're going to get this kind of exposure, and I can quantify that.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I would ask for as a brand is to say if you know your traffic, then tell me about my skew level conversion rates. Because here's this thing, scott. Brands want their sales of their products to go up, obviously, but if store traffic is declining, their overall sell-through may not look good. Yet the conversion rate on that SKU based on fewer people in the store may actually be up. So by understanding SKU level conversion, the brand can say hey look, sales may not have been where we want it to be, but our conversion rates are up based on doing this effort, and now I have a success signal that's quantifiable, that could lead to additional investments, et cetera.
Speaker 1:And while you were talking, one of the things that occurred to me is there's the everyday in the run in the aisle aspects of the business. But I think particularly both retailers and brands are curious about when they do feature promotions where a product is on the end cap, it's in a featured area of a store and really getting the maximum ROI out of that and it feels like the kind of traffic conversion data that you're talking about. It's certainly important every day, but in understanding the performance of promotional timeframes, of promotional events, of certainly product that is featured, it just becomes amplified in those scenarios, does it not?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sure does, and traffic counting it starts at the front door. But there's all kinds of technologies that are available to retailers to understand movements within a store or within a specific area around an end cap or display. I remember many years ago I was contacted by one of the major soft drink companies in America and they wanted to know can you tell me, can you help us understand the conversion rates of our product down the aisle of a major retailer and I said, yeah, I could actually help you understand that if the retailer was willing to. And that particular retailer said, no, no, thank you.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting, and I think the lost opportunity is, is that perhaps in that scenario the retailer was being guarded with their data, and I can somewhat respect that. But you can't get smarter about promotions, whether you're in the buyer's seat or in the supplier's seat, unless you have data and understand how promotions perform in effort to try and make them better right.
Speaker 2:Yes, indeed, and I think that the data maturity and acuity among all players involved has changed considerably. I mean, everyone's trying to make better data-informed decisions, and so I think what comes along with that, and which is terrific, is more sharing of data and insights.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. Now, one of the things talking about store labor and something you touched on earlier you said that most retailers schedule labor incorrectly I've seen it both through the lens as a retailer and as a consumer as well and they sometimes ignore traffic patterns. Can you maybe expand upon, explain how better alignment between staffing and actual traffic in a store enhances not only the productivity, the return on the labor dollar that a retailer spends, but also improves the shopping experience for consumers as well?
Speaker 2:Right. So your frontline labor in any physical store is really the catalyst to conversion. I mean, the conversion rates don't happen at head office, and so, to this day, store level labor is proportioned out, allocated out, based on store sales. If you generate more sales, you get more labor. The problem with this idea is that a store can be getting more traffic, so traffic is going up, the opportunity is getting bigger for the store. They're understaffed, they're not converting, their sales are flat or maybe go down. So if their sales go down or flat, they're not getting more labor.
Speaker 2:So what ends up happening is people go to the store. They can't get served, lineups are too long, they leave without buying. Not only is that an immediate lost sale for the retailer, but there's a good probability, or some probability, that that shopper is going to post something on social saying something negative about that particular retailer and that's going to leave a permanent digital scar. And you know, retailers, no retailer can afford to walk any shopper that visited their store, because and I talk about traffic being a precious, non-renewable resource in this day and age I have a hundred places to buy whatever it is you're selling, and even one indiscretion can lead to me defecting. And so with labor, I'm encouraging.
Speaker 2:In fact, I dedicate an entire chapter to this idea. You have to schedule labor to the traffic opportunity, labor to the traffic opportunity. Retailers don't want to do that. Only half of retailers today, based on my best estimate, even track traffic. They use transaction counts as a proxy, but the problem is that only represents the people that made a sale that actually purchased. What about those that visited, intended to buy but left without buying? That's the opportunity that I think every retailer today should be thinking about. It's the sale they almost have, and traffic and conversion data shows you exactly where and when to look. Aligning your labor to traffic is one of the biggest and most effective levers a retailer can pull to improve their conversion rates and therefore their financial results.
Speaker 1:You know that is a big point that I've witnessed so many different staff meetings in my time in retail in which that topic was talked about and talked about endlessly, as it should. But the proxy to your point was always transaction count rather than traffic count, and having a data-informed perspective on when traffic is happening is really the better basis upon which to make staffing decisions, because that will ultimately lead to the sale. But if you don't have the staffing and you lose the sale, you lose visibility to where you should have made that investment. Labor hours in some of the most respected retailers in the world still are not quite on that path, or understanding that or even tracking it to your point right.
Speaker 2:And it's quite shocking, scott, there was a book that came out a few years back called the Knowing Doing Gap, and I think that applies here. Retailers intuitively understand they need to allocate labor, that precious labor, and I'm not saying throw more labor in the store. I'm saying understand what your labor is delivering. Frankly, I think the way labor productivity is measured well, it's mostly not measured. It's done in sales per labor hour. That's the most common measure. But again, here's the problem with that.
Speaker 2:Anything that you're using that a retailer uses sales for as an indicator needs to be broken out by traffic versus conversion rate versus average ticket equal sales. You need to understand the underlying drivers, because what you will discover is that that by applying labor more effectively, you could potentially have less labor in the store, deliver better results, not waste labor putting it in places that aren't. That isn't using that labor effectively, and you'll have a better measure of the productivity of that labor, which I argue should be based on sales per visit, store visit or store traffic count. See, traffic can go up and down in a store and a store team has very little control. Their job is to serve those visitors when they come in. So if traffic is down 10% in a store, even despite Herculean efforts by the store team. Let's say sales are only down 5%. Well, if traffic was down 10%, that store actually performed better relative to that lower opportunity. They should not be held accountable for the traffic in the store. They should be held accountable for are they converting that traffic into a sale?
Speaker 1:Makes sense, and so one of the things you talk about in the book is this concept of super converting stores, and I'm intrigued by that terminology. What is a super converting store? How do you identify them, and how do different players in the retail business, whether it's the buyer, the operator, the brand of the sales team, how should they even think about or care about this concept of a super converting store?
Speaker 2:Right, okay. So over the years, almost most virtually all retailers I engage with will ask me how do we improve conversion rates? Like, how do you do that? Or give me best practices in the industry. And you know what's funny when you track store trafficking conversion rates for many, many retailers, as I've done over these 22 years, what you come to realize is that, within a chain years, what you come to realize is that not only do conversion rates vary widely across the industry and across retail segment, but they vary widely within the same chain. And I use this as an example of an 800 store chain that we analyze their store traffic and conversion trends in and their conversion rates ranged from a low of 30% to a high of 75% in the same chain. And so my whole argument is forget about best practices or general bromides like staff to traffic, which retailers just go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that, and then they use transactions instead of traffic. But why? I show this chart? And as you look at it, it's just really remarkable because it shows how different each one of these 800 stores are.
Speaker 2:The point is simply this how is it that some of your stores can convert at such a high level and others at so much lower level. Now there are structural issues like mall stores versus off mall versus freestanding, so there's going to be those kinds of dynamics. Mall stores always have higher traffic, lower conversion because there's more incidental visits, where offsite or freestanding stores tend to be more intentional. So conversion rates should naturally be higher. Traffic tends to be lower. But the point of the matter is that for any given retailer I say this you need to map the conversion rates of all your stores. Some are going to be low traffic, medium traffic, high traffic. Organize them by traffic volume. Look at your conversion rates for all the stores and pick the high watermark of conversion rates over the chain average for each that go across all different traffic volumes and what you'll discover is that some of the very best performing stores are your low traffic, low volume stores. They might be old stores and this shocks some retail execs because we'll be looking at the results from some of their latest, greatest new store of the future, all the things that retailers and I think rightly do to try to move their store performance forward.
Speaker 2:What can often discover? It's not the latest, the greatest, it's some of the older stores, and my point is simply this your own stores have the same systems, the same products, the same kind of training regimes, so on and so forth, same kind of competitive environment, so on and so forth. And so if you can understand what your super converting stores are doing within your own chain, understand those. First, take the procedures, behaviors, processes that those store teams are doing, and then see what you can propagate across your other stores to bring your conversion rates up. Then start looking outside your organization, but start internally. There's one other thing that's really important about that, and that is when you go to propagate these ideas internally. It's way more compelling and believable for store teams to hear that other stores in the chain are doing it, not some other chain and who knows if it applies. And so that's what I recommend retailers do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, as you're talking, one of the things that occurred to me is, in my own experiences and you've probably encountered a lot of folks like this a lot of retailers and even those brands that have access to store level data from the retail partners will still manage to averages. In other words, they'll look at the overall performance of the chain instead of looking for opportunities to unlock value in specific store or specific store type or store makeup opportunities. And I used to. You know I'd have a great performing item as a buyer and you know you'd love to pat yourself on the back as a buyer, but then I found a lot of value in finding individual stores that weren't performing well in a great item that was doing well across the chain. And try to challenge operators to go say, hey, you know this item is rocking it nationwide, but in this group of stores it's not doing well.
Speaker 1:And it occurs to me that that's just an example. Whether you are a retailer, whatever role you play in the retailer or a brand say, hey, it's great that the overall performance is X, but where are the learnings from either those individual locations that are doing poorly or the learnings from locations that are doing really well that maybe are doing something different, that you'd want to replicate that and you don't find that unless you dive into the data and understand what's happening from a not only traffic but from a conversion rate. Is that the right way to think about that?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's absolutely correct, and in fact I dedicate a whole chapter to this idea of SKU level conversion and the impact on that in refining product localization and product mix decisions. And so I agreed with everything you just said, scott, but I would add that generally the success metric is sell-through. But I would say I wouldn't look at just sell-through, I would be looking at skew level conversion rates to really find success metrics, and I share an example in the book about how a particular product might look like a winner based on sell-through, but when you analyze it based on conversion, what you may discover is that that product is successful but in a different way may discover is that that product is successful but in a different way. Or a product that may not look successful is actually successful because there's lower store traffic, so sell-through doesn't look good, but relative to that smaller opportunity, the skew is actually on fire. So it it it just. It changes the, the view of how something is performing, and that changes the decisions you make, and that's what makes this data so powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it occurs to me that one of the benefits of AI and you knew we were going to AI was going to somehow find its way into this conversation today. But it feels like when we have more data overall to consume, no matter what our role is in the ecosystem of retail, you know dashboards and algorithms and AI-based tools provide a tremendous amount of access to and the ability to leverage data, but there's still the insights that come from that, the actions that you take, what your role is. That's where the real value is in unlocking the value of some of the digital tools like AI, in understanding what's happening not only across the chain, but in individual store performance and store behavior and the behavior of consumers in that store Is that accurate?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is, and I do discuss AI in my book, but light treatment AI is moving in so many directions simultaneously and so quickly. But what does AI require? It requires foundational data, and I believe that store traffic and conversion insights are part of the foundation that any AI program likely that impacts the physical store needs to rely upon. And so, look, I've often said retailers can't algorithm their way to success, and I'll change that to say they can't AI their way to success either if they have a poor store operating model and they're just not getting the foundational and basic things correct. And again, this data and these tools, they're powerful, they're fantastic, but if you don't have good underlying data and really have it focused on trying to produce either outcomes or insights that you can make actual decisions on, then you're chasing your tail as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. I think one of the last topics I want to broach with you and you and I have talked about this previously is it wasn't but a few years ago that this topic of retail apocalypse and store closings was all the discussion. I was in academia at the time at Texas A&M, and I had many an argument with my colleagues about which was going to win stores or online and I argued that both or neither. In other words, it's not one or the other. The two work together. I think you one of the things that come away from the book and the work that you do is you remain very optimistic about brick and mortar retail, about the important role of stores, how stores and digital kind of work together. What really gives you confidence about the future of physical retail now kind of coming out of the pandemic and looking forward into the future uh, now kind of coming out of the pandemic and looking forward into the future.
Speaker 2:Well, let's go. Let's talk about the online versus offline, and and your your conclusions. I agree with that. You know the very best retailers have come to learn. You need to do both effectively. That online drives your physical business. Your physical, physical business can help your online business. It's not an either or, and these systems need to be synchronized.
Speaker 2:You know, jeff Bezos, in a Harvard Business Review interview, was asked what he sees coming in the future. This goes back many years, but it was an interesting question, jeff. What do you see happening in the next 10 years? And he says you know, I get that question a lot. What I rarely get is what won't change in the next 10 years, because at Amazon, we can spin up big revenue flywheels around those things that don't change.
Speaker 2:I believe store traffic and physical stores are one of those things that won't change. One of those things that won't change. Think about it, scott the pandemic smashed into the retail industry like a meteorite. I think every industry in all of society was impacted, but I think, in particular, retailers struggled with this and even at the height of the pandemic online versus physical stores online sales were no more than around 30% 70% of transactions were still done in physical stores. That has started to change back and retail physical stores represent something between 75% and 80% of transactions today. There is something about the human connection of going into a physical store, of retrieving that good, of touching it, holding it, the three-dimensional experience of that store and then leaving with that purchase and enjoying it. I think there's something on a very primal, human level and that's what makes store traffic and physical stores so resilient to pandemics, supply chain issues, hyperinflation and let's throw in tariffs for good measure.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, mark. This has been a fantastic conversation and I think you've really kind of reframed how we should think about store traffic in a way I'm pretty confident will really resonate with our listeners and our viewers and how we should not view it just as a number or metric on a report, but as a mirror about how retail actually functions, and from marketing to store labor, to customer experience and obviously the most important thing is from a conversion standpoint understanding how you turn a browser into a buyer, not just online, but in physical stores as well. So thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you, scott, it was my pleasure.
Speaker 1:You bet. So if you are a broker, a brand, a buyer, the retailer, I can't tell you how much I would recommend understanding some of the things that Mark has shared with us today. So if you want to grab a copy of Store Traffic is a Gift when it comes out later this year we'll leave a link on the screen for you to look. If you'd like to understand more about what Mark and his team at Headcount are doing, you can obviously follow him on LinkedIn or visit him and the company at headcountcom. Hopefully, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform and share it with your colleagues in retail, because conversations like this, I think, are so valuable to all of us in the ecosystem of retail, and I'm so excited that we've had Mark share his thoughts and open up our mind to some really new but vital ideas as to how we think about performance in retail. And so thank you for joining us for the Digital Front Door. I'm Scott Benedict. Thanks for listening.