Point of sale analysis: how to find a "fish spot"
How to make the store popular with customers? Necessary a good place location, competent sellers and thoughtful pricing policy. Such an important indicator as store traffic will give you an understanding of the demand outlet and will become the best indicator her work.
Why does an entrepreneur need traffic data
– this is information about its attendance and the intensity of the flow of buyers for a certain period of time. Based on traffic data, entrepreneurs can calculate the conversion – that is, to identify the proportion of buyers from total number people who visited the store.
As you know, store traffic varies depending on the location of the outlet. Therefore, many entrepreneurs are faced with such a problem that the traffic in the store is low for the simple reason that the outlet is located in an inconvenient place.
That is why the patency must be calculated even at the stage of choosing the premises for the store, since after the opening it will be too late to change anything. In order not to get lost, experts advise measuring and predicting such an important indicator as “store traffic” at the earliest stages.
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Shop traffic count
Even at the planning stage, experienced businessmen and retail professionals Special attention give the location of the store and it is the most significant indicator when choosing a place – it's traffic.
Simply put, information about the number of people who pass by a trade enterprise for a specific amount of time – hour, day.
Many retailers are puzzled by the analysis of the point of sale only when the outlet is already functioning, but "something is going wrong." This is not true. It is necessary to analyze the patency of the outlet not only before its opening, but also periodically after the opening, evaluating changes in traffic, analyzing target audience.
It is easy to measure store traffic on your own:
- observation method. It is carried out by visually counting people passing or passing by a store (future or already functioning) and manually entering the numbers;
- Use gadgets. Approximate traffic and traffic in the store today can be calculated using applications for smartphones or, for example, using a regular pedometer;
- Use a video recorder. To do this, it is quite convenient to park the car in front of the entrance to the store and leave the DVR to work during the day or turn on the recording every day at the same time;
When choosing the location of the future store, you must also consider:
- the area of pedestrian accessibility of this place;
- the potential of this place in terms of the location of nearby residential buildings, transport stops, parking lots, highways and highways;
- number of competing stores or stores with an identical assortment
How to measure store traffic
The most important indicator of the analysis of an outlet is its traffic, that is, the number of visitors. Each outlet will have different traffic.
Marketers and retailers say that store traffic can constantly change: it depends on seasonality, demand, it can “fluctuate” depending on the days of the week.
Many companies today provide retailers with their services in calculating store traffic or traffic, determining the conversion of purchases.
This article discusses the features of the selection of retail space (as well as premises for sales offices, services and entertainment facilities) for rent in Moscow. The data presented in it is especially useful for those representatives of small businesses who do not have a marketing specialist on their staff.
This market is very diverse, it is represented by both professionals and amateurs, and the latter are found both among tenants and landlords, and among realtors.
When looking for premises for trading, its prospects are assessed different ways- from intuitive selection to the most complex methods of calculation and analysis of numerous factors. For example, the experience of Japanese specialists who study the contents of garbage cans in the area where they are going to open new stores is known. In this way, they find out what goods the locals buy.
Of course, it all depends on the tenant. An approximate request for a novice businessman to select the required area looks like this: a small inexpensive room in a good location. This assumption is wrong from the outset, because such requirements are incompatible: the premises, as a rule, are either inexpensive or in a good location. IN this case the potential tenant clearly does not have a large personal experience and prioritizes the desire to save, which rarely contributes to high profits from trading.
Another option is domestic (often network) companies that open more than the first store. They most likely employ both marketers and specialists whose duties include selecting premises that meet specific requirements. The level of professionalism of employees of such firms is quite high, however, given that domestic networks periodically close their facilities, the choice does not always hit the bull's-eye. The reason for this may be the lack of clear methods, inefficient statistical analysis of available points of sale, the use of trial and error, as well as myths such as that there are good areas, and if the people living nearby are wealthy, sales will be high no matter how bad the location is. room.
The most professional selection of retail space is made by specialists who have experience working according to foreign standards or a franchising system from foreign firms, in which personal sympathies and opinions of individual specialists often give way to clear calculation methods. It can be assumed that a company with hundreds of stores around the world and conducting statistical studies, draws accurate conclusions about which premises will pay for themselves and which will not, regardless of the city. At the same time, a number of characteristics that are important in making a decision are taken into account. For example, the presence of a shop window increases sales in this type of activity by so many percent, from the flow of pedestrians so many percent will go to such a store, etc. But no matter what principle the premises are chosen, when we are talking about Moscow, you need to take into account the reasons why you will have to spend more time on this than in any other city. One of them is that realtors and owners offering rentals do not provide accurate and adequate information about their properties. The only exception is the proposals of a number of management companies regarding areas from 20,000 sq. m in shopping and entertainment centers. In this case, the landlords own big amount information on the proposed facilities, including research data, and the professionally designed concept of such centers guarantees tenants a high return on investment. But, let's say, for shopping centers organized on former factory territories, this applies to a much lesser extent.
However, there are many offers on the market next type: a store of such and such an area in a good passage and travel place. By making a call on the ad, you can get information about the price, area, availability of shop windows, distance from the metro, distance from the road. But in response to the question of what kind of traffic the store has, the owner or realtor will begin to say something obscure, inviting you to come and see. Considering that a potential tenant of the store processes up to 100 offers per day, it is almost impossible to visit each address for inspection. However, not only the area and price are the main characteristics of the store, but above all, the ability of this room to independently provide sales. AND essential qualities while regardless of the direction trading activities- permeability, traffic flow and type of area. Passability is the number of pedestrians who passed by the trading premises for a certain period of time, and at a distance of no more than 3-5 meters from the entrance, so that the object was clearly visible. If the entrance to the store and the shop windows are at the end of the building, then the passability is considered at the end, and not at the facade, and if the premises are located on the second floor of the shopping center - at its doors on the second floor, and not at the general entrance to shopping mall. Calculation techniques can be arbitrarily complex, and are often marketers' tools. But how much easier it would be to look for a room if the owners and realtors used a single method of calculating the patency, which does not take much time.
As an example, the author of the article offers an approximate calculation of the patency in work time. This is convenient and reasonable: there are five working days, and only two days off, working hours occupy a significant part of everyday life. You can count the number of people passing by the entrance to the building within five minutes from 10:00 to 18:00 and multiply this number by 12. Thus, we get the traffic per hour. The technique, of course, has a large error, but it is quite accessible to realtors, owners and novice businessmen. When comparing objects according to this indicator, the difference (or lack of it) becomes obvious.
Another important factor in evaluating a retail space is traffic flow. This is the number of cars passing by in a given period of time. The presence of convenient parking and the visibility of the premises from the road are critically important in its formation (if there is a forest or a fence between it and an expensive one, then even if it is the Moscow Ring Road, this circumstance will not help your business in any way). It also matters if the highway is one-way, how many lanes. You can count cars, just like pedestrians, while taking into account the work of traffic lights (if there are any nearby), so that it doesn’t turn out that you counted cars on a blocked road or, on the contrary, as soon as it caught fire green light. Interesting averages.
The third necessary evaluation criterion is the type of area, that is, the main type of buildings characterizing the given area (residential, office, industrial). At the same time, be sure to pay attention to the building density, number of storeys, the time when the main part of the houses was built, since this is important for analyzing the contingent of residents (as a rule, pensioners live in Khrushchevs, and a more active part of the population lives in new buildings). Significant factors along with those mentioned above are transport system(distance from the metro station, railway station, bus stop) and the presence of nearby establishments that attract visitors (shopping centers, large educational institutions, etc.).
It would be useful if owners and realtors, when presenting retail premises on the real estate market, instead of the phrases “well, really, this is a good place” provided specific data and real numbers. However, at the moment, a request to calculate the patency within five minutes is usually refused, and sometimes you can hear something like: “Yes, I’ll stand counting!” - but at the same time, the realtor wants to receive $ 8,000 as a commission on the transaction.
As a result, in search suitable premises for a store, you have to travel often and pay a lot of attention to objects that are not very suitable for trade. Information for owners and realtors: if the store does not meet the needs of the customer, it will not be possible to rent it out - and you should not waste your own and other people's time.
The main demand in the retail space market in Moscow falls on small grocery, hardware stores and hairdressers. It is in this sector of the market that the expensive services of professional marketers are rarely used. The example below may be useful to potential tenants.
Suppose you need to find a room for a small grocery store in residential area. Practice shows that such stores are visited mainly by residents of neighboring houses, especially those to whom, as they say, on the road (from the metro station, other public transport stops), and they walk or drive past every day. Thus, it makes sense to analyze whether frequently used pedestrian paths and a road pass near the store, calculate the specific traffic in numbers and estimate for how many houses (taking into account their number of storeys) this store is the closest. It is also important to study consumer requests: how much these people spend on products, on what basis they choose a retail outlet where they most often shop. For example, a retiree who has time but limited funds is more likely to go to the nearest wholesale market, and those who work are likely to prefer that the necessary shopping can be spent as little time and effort as possible - and the place will be chosen accordingly.
How to analyze permeability? You should do the calculations several times: morning, afternoon, evening, weekdays and weekends (only about ten digits) to approximately determine the number of people passing per day and the percentage of people visiting the grocery store. Take a closer look at a store like the one you plan to rent, by location, area, and type of trade (through the counter or self-service system) and count how many people from the stream walking by went inside. Let's say this figure is 5%. Thus, it is not difficult to guess how many visitors you can expect. However, if another store is located somewhere nearby (your competitor), it is logical to halve this figure, that is, divide the number of potential buyers by the number of outlets of the same profile.
Having experience in a grocery store, you can determine how much a person spends on average per visit - " average check". If you try, it's easy to find out, even just by going into this kind of store and watching the customers (you need to consider that in self-service stores, a person, as a rule, leaves more money than when selling through the counter). For example, it turned out that 125 people a day can come to you and the average visitor spends 100 rubles. Now let's estimate the potential revenue based on the traffic factor: the number of people per day is multiplied by 30 and the average check. In this case, the total will be 375,000 rubles.
It should immediately be noted that this theoretical example using the patency factor, and not a way to solve all the problems when choosing a store. Other criteria need to be explored, as traffic is not the only characteristic that is important for a grocery store. However, having developed a system of significant factors and ways to evaluate them, it is possible to objectively compare the premises offered for rent. At the same time, evaluation methods should be quick and simple, because the premises will be rented out within a few days, and it may turn out that someone else has rented the retail space that is ideal for your business. If you analyzed the prospects of the place before you rented a store, then you will answer the question of whether the game is worth the candle even before you invest.
Beginning businessmen like to talk about how things can be done well and badly, and under equal conditions, the revenue of one store can be greater than that of another. But before choosing a room, think about whether it makes sense to make an effort good specialists to a bad outlet? We hope that the experience reflected in this article will help you get an objective idea of the effective selection of premises, save time and effort and make your business in the trade or service sector more profitable.
When choosing a place for your future store, one of the most important indicators of the prospects of a place will be traffic. It is often not so easy for an entrepreneur to compare two similar points in order to choose a more promising one in terms of traffic. In this article, we will talk about how to measure store traffic.
What is permeability
To avoid confusion, we will call the number of people passing by the outlet as patency. That is, these are the people who will see your store and potentially enter it. We will refer to traffic as the number of customers who visit your store. That is, traffic differs from traffic in that traffic has interest in your outlet. With traffic, you work inside the store, trying to. You attract people passing by to your store with various advertising tricks.
Why measure throughput and traffic
The goals of measuring patency can be completely different. Let's look at why we may need to consider patency.
- Find out the potential of a place for a store. If you have experience in your business, then most likely you clearly know what percentage of people who pass by will be interested in your store. Knowing your own and conversions, it will not be difficult to calculate the profitability of a point.
- Supervise franchisees. If you are selling a franchise, you may face fraud from the franchisee. To avoid this, it is necessary to count traffic on an ongoing basis.
- Check competitor performance. We love to look around and it is always interesting how your competitors are doing. Therefore, often entrepreneurs consider someone else's traffic. Knowing the traffic, you can roughly calculate all other indicators.
- Check the performance of your store. Traffic is one of the store and you need to monitor it constantly.
How to calculate permeability
Traffic and throughput are calculated in exactly the same way. There are several proven methods of counting both in a permanent mode, for your own stores, and imputed options.
We count the traffic in your store
Go to any large shopping center and take a closer look, everywhere you will see customer attendance counters. They can look like a mirror strip under the ceiling. Or laser sensors mounted on the sides of the aisle. These devices have a sufficiently high measurement accuracy and provide information about traffic in almost online mode. Prices for such devices start from 5000 rubles.
We consider the patency on the street or in someone else's store
Counting traffic outside your domain is somewhat more labor intensive. Here you will no longer be able to automate the entire process and you will have to work a little. Although there are companies that will do this work for you, naturally not for free. However, there are tools that will make your job easier.
By the way, on inexpensive attendance counters, traffic is displayed on the display of the counter itself and is visible to everyone who has entered. As a rule, such counters are in small and non-chain stores. So, if you're lucky, you can at least every day find out the competitor's traffic.
Calculation of patency using a video recorder
To calculate in this way, all you need is a car with the DVR turned on. And of course the opportunity to put it in front of the place being studied. You can bet all day. Then, in the accelerated view, consider the patency. It will take you about 4 hours to calculate a twelve hour recording. The accuracy of the data is the highest, while you will see the patency up to an hour.
The right location for the location of the future outlet is one of the key factors of profitability. It has always been like this, but it is becoming even more relevant now, in the face of fierce competition - especially in some retail segments and in major cities. What should entrepreneurs pay attention to when assessing a territory? 5 steps to choose perfect place described by Denis Strukov, founder of the geoinformation system Geointellect.
Surely many of you have heard the famous American saying “location, location & location”. It was first used in 1926, and it remains relevant to this day.
Before opening a retail outlet, follow these 5 steps to choosing the perfect location.
Step 1. We know our portrait of the target audience and correlate it with the portrait located on the territory
Before opening a retail outlet, it is important to understand who your target audience is. And the more accurate her portrait, the better. Marketers advise creating detailed profiles:
This is Katya, she is 25 years old, she is not married. Katya lives in St. Petersburg. He works in an IT company and earns a little more than 40 thousand rubles. From work, Katya likes to walk. She runs in the park on weekends. Katya prefers to buy groceries at the nearest store. If Katya wants to relax, she goes to the city center. Katya is open, responsive and kind.
Knowing your target audience, it will not be difficult to correlate with the audience in the location in question. It is necessary to carefully analyze the age of the population, its purchasing power, consumer habits. It will be useful to calculate the proportion of the working and living population in the area and determine who can become a potential client. Often in a particular location, a non-resident population will potentially enter your store. An analysis of the income of the population in the study area will be very important, especially for the “above average” income level.
For example, the map below shows that the average income of the population living in the Krylatskoye district is 139,459 rubles.
Comparable to the average cost of renting a 1-room apartment in this area. It is equal to 67,444 rubles.
There is a direct relationship between the economic situation of the residents of the area and the success of the future outlet. The higher the level of employment, the higher the income of people living or working here, the higher the cost of housing, the more attractive it is for representatives, for example, of the luxury segment. On the contrary, in residential areas with block houses far from the subway, most likely, people with an income below the average live or students rent an apartment. These people are also interesting and they can be "calculated" by infrastructure objects, for example.
Step 2. Determine the density of infrastructure objects
Examine the area where the new outlet is planned to be located. Explore the transport and trade infrastructure, the number of places where labor is applied, the number of objects Catering etc. Assessing the transport component, it is worth paying attention to the convenience of interchanges, the nearest plans for reconstruction. Many car dealerships, not taking into account the plans for the construction of interchanges, may be "under the bridge", which will reduce accessibility to them and the visibility of the sign. It is worth considering the planned metro stations, as well as real estate under construction.
As a determining factor in the retail infrastructure, you should use the service radius of the retail facility. The radius of service (pedestrian accessibility) is the area of activity of a retail outlet, which is determined by the distance that buyers cover from their place of residence to this retail facility.
On the map, we depicted a radius equal to 450 meters or 5 minutes of travel.
In this way, you can build the service radii of all competitors' outlets and understand where the radii intersect. The same can be done with transport accessibility, which assumes that your potential buyer moves, for example, by car.
The map below shows how far a potential buyer will travel from a given retail facility in 5 minutes. The area of the constructed zone is 1.92 sq. km.
And the last one in this step. It turns out that it is possible to model the target audience by infrastructure objects. Look at the density of universities and the density of catering facilities in the city, look at the density of banks and boutiques in the same city, and you will see that there are interesting differences related to the system of preferences of students and active business people with above average income.
Step 3. Customer flow
The next step is to analyze the outlet for how much man will pass in close proximity to her. The task is to analyze the movement of the flow of buyers. What technologies are used in retail?
If you have one retail facility, go global, look at the statistics of the districts, select the direction that you can explore, and then study locally. Local study of the trading zone implies, firstly, an understanding of the zone itself, barriers (barriers). And secondly, a direct assessment of pedestrian traffic in different time day: morning, afternoon, evening, night, living population or working during the day - it all depends on the business. Perhaps you do not need either, but you need parks! Based on local analysis, e.g. data cellular communication() you can determine the number of people who pass through your trading area at different times of the day on weekdays and weekends.
In the Krylatskoye area, the flows are distributed as follows.
It is important to resort to field research territory. This is an important part of geomarketing. It is impossible to get accurate data from the Internet. During the working day, it is necessary to record all the people entering the outlet of your competitor, and the time of their visit. To help this today come mobile applications with maps in which it is easy to enter information about the trading zone: a competitor, objects under construction, pedestrian and auto traffic, take pictures of objects. The analysis of this data will help in the future to correctly position your outlet and correctly form the assortment policy of the new outlet in relation to the existing "state of affairs" in the zone. If for a number of retail segments (for example, for retail banking) information about the location of branches on their websites is sometimes sufficient, then for such segments as pharmacies, food retail or public catering, it is necessary to “check” the territories in the fields and take into account the already collected information when analyzing in geomarketing web applications.
Step 4. Competitive environment
You should choose a retail outlet in such a way that in the immediate vicinity there are several more competing retail facilities that have chosen the same pricing policy.
For example, in Novosibirsk there is a so-called shoe street, where about 50 shoe stores are located. They create an impressive flow of buyers: customers from different parts cities go to buy shoes. Wherein price segments different and the audience, respectively, too. You can find both expensive, branded shoes, and the mass market.
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How many hours or days do you need to measure traffic near the proposed location of the new store?
Each retailer answers this question independently. To assist in this matter, One by One conducted a series of studies to find out the most optimal patency measurement scheme.
The study was based on data from 56 corridors of weekend format shopping centers (weekend traffic is greater than weekday traffic) located in the Russian Federation, where automatic counters of visitors were installed.
This study allowed to form general rules, which we recommend using to decide how to calculate the traffic of a store or other object. We are guided by the same rules when calculating traffic for our customers.
Rule number 1. Ensure representativeness
The selected period of time should take 10% of the forecast period. That is, if the goal is to find out the traffic of a location in a shopping center per month, then measuring 33 hours will be quite sufficient (this is 10% of the total time of the shopping center in a month).
Rule number 2. Measure on weekdays and weekends
According to numerous studies and electronic counting systems, shopping center traffic in general repeats the same dynamics: an even distribution of traffic depending on the day of the week: weekdays, which make up 60% of attendance, and weekends, which occupy the remaining 40%. This allows you to form the following rule: measurements must be taken on weekdays and weekends. The recommended days are Saturday, Sunday, Friday (as the third largest day) and Monday or Thursday to choose from. This division helps to determine the type of shopping center (holiday or not), and allows you to calculate the entire month on the basis of measurements.
Rice. 1. Distribution of the bellhop
traffic by day of the week. year 2013.
56 corridors of the "weekend" shopping center.
Rule number 3. Measure all day
How many hours should be measured within a single day in order to obtain representative results?
The ideal option is to calculate according to the future work schedule of the outlet. But to implement such a calculation, it is necessary to take into account the specifics of manual measurements. An employee participating in the study is able to make qualitative measurements 5-6 hours a day with obligatory breaks. A further increase in the workload per worker can lead to serious errors in the calculations. If, nevertheless, a full 12-hour measurement is required, then it must be carried out by 2 specialists or (which is correct) use video recording or measurement through wi-fi sensors.
Separately, it is worth noting the practice of taking measurements for 15 minutes a day - this is the opposite extreme of these studies. The results obtained cannot be taken into account, since the period is too short, because of this, the error can reach ± 95%.
If potential customers actively use mobile devices, it is possible to consider measuring traffic using portable wifi meters. Then you can increase the study period (and therefore improve accuracy) without a significant investment.
Rule number 4. Use data that can be verified
Experience shows that video recording of traffic and its subsequent independent calculation are a mandatory criterion for a representative study. Making a decision to open a store on a database that cannot be verified is very risky. After video filming of traffic, the recording must be submitted for independent recalculation to specialists who did not participate in manual measurement. So measurement from a routine and uncontrolled process turns into a full-fledged study, based on the results of which you can take management decisions. Of course, such studies are more expensive and require the involvement of external specialists, but the cost of an error in this case is too high to strive to minimize the risks.
Rule number 5. Correctly extrapolate and interpret attendance data
To determine the required hours for traffic measurement, we use statistics that allow us to determine peak hours in a standard shopping center or data on the average intensity of street traffic.
Selecting the hours of interest and summing their fraction, we get total weight selected intervals throughout the week. After receiving data from measurements, traffic for the month is calculated.
For example, the selected time for measurements is 10% of the required period (month). If the measurements show traffic of 30,000 people, then the traffic forecast for the month will be 30,000 x 100 / 10 = 300,000 people. These data will be representative with an accuracy of 90% and an error of ±12%. That is, when conducting 100 studies with such a sample in this period of time, in 90% of cases, the answers obtained according to the laws of statistics will be within ± 12% of the original.
