Okay, so I wanted to figure out why certain parts of my store felt dead while others were always jammed. It just didn’t make sense, felt like I wasn’t using the space right. Sales were okay, but I had this gut feeling things could be way better if people actually moved through the place properly.
Starting Out Simple
First thing I did? Honestly, just watched people. Stood near the back for a few hours on busy days. Tried to see where they went first, where they stopped, where they just walked past. It kinda helped, but it was guesswork mostly. Hard to track everyone, and you forget stuff fast.
Then I got one of those basic beam counters at the door. You know, the ones that just beep and add a number when someone walks in or out. That told me how many people came in, which was something, but not where they went. Didn’t solve my layout problem at all. Just gave me a total number for the day.
Getting A Bit More Serious
I figured I needed more detail. Looked into some options. Saw all this fancy stuff online, expensive systems. Didn’t want to spend a fortune. Found some simpler camera-based things. Not facial recognition or anything creepy, just stuff that basically tracks movement as dots or heat blobs on a map of the store.
Decided to try a basic setup. Got a couple of wide-angle cameras, nothing special, just decent ones. Had to figure out the best place to mount them. Put one near the entrance, angled down, and another covering the main floor area. Didn’t want blind spots.
Setting it up wasn’t too bad:
- Mounted the cameras up high, out of the way.
- Ran the wires (that was the annoying part, hiding them).
- Hooked them up to a small computer running the software.
Seeing the Patterns
Let it run for a week or so. The software just collected the movement data. Then I started looking at it. It showed these heat maps, basically. Bright red spots where everyone crowded, blue and green spots where hardly anyone went.
It was pretty eye-opening. People came in, stopped right at the front display, then mostly went down the main aisle on the right. A whole section on the left? Almost totally ignored. And there was this bottleneck near the checkout counter I hadn’t really noticed was that bad. People were getting stuck.
Making the Changes
Okay, seeing it was one thing, doing something was next. Based on those heat maps:
I moved the main front display slightly deeper into the store. Didn’t want people just stopping dead right inside the door.
Took the stuff from the popular right aisle and swapped some of it with the ignored left aisle. Tried to pull people over that way with things they actually wanted to see.
Rethought the path to the checkout. Moved a shelving unit that was causing the jam-up, opened that space right up.
It took a bit of physical work, shifting things around. The store looked kinda different afterwards.
Did it Work?
Let the cameras run again for another week with the new layout. Checked the new heat maps. Big difference. The traffic was way more spread out. People were actually going down the left aisle now! That dead zone wasn’t dead anymore.
The bottleneck near the checkout? Much better flow. Less red, more orange and yellow, meaning people moved through faster.
And the best part? Sales in that previously ignored section actually went up. Not massively overnight, but it was noticeable. It felt like the whole store was being used better. Customers seemed less stressed too, not bumping into each other as much.
So yeah, tracking footfall, even with a simple setup, really helped me see the problems I couldn’t spot just by looking. It wasn’t magic, just gave me the info I needed to shuffle things around smartly. Definitely worth the effort.