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The holiday shopping season may still be a few weeks away, but for retailers, now is the time to start preparing.
End of Q2 and beginning of Q4 offers an important opportunity to take a closer look at what is happening inside your store. When are customers coming in, which areas are getting the most traffic, and if there are certain days or times when your team is stretched thin?
These patterns can give you valuable insight into what you may see when holiday shopping picks up, and help you make smarter staffing decisions before the rush arrives.
With the right store traffic data, you can move from reacting to busy periods to planning for them.
Before making your holiday staffing plan, start by looking at your current store traffic.
October can provide a useful baseline for understanding customer behavior. Review your traffic patterns throughout the month and look for trends such as:
Instead of looking only at how many people are visiting your store, look at when and where customers are moving through it.
This gives you a more complete picture of how your store operates during a typical shopping period and provides a starting point for anticipating what may change during the holidays.
Total customer counts are helpful, but they only tell part of the story.
Understanding how customers navigate your store can reveal opportunities to improve staffing and the overall shopping experience.
For example, you may notice that one area of your store consistently experiences heavier traffic during certain hours. Another department may be relatively quiet during the same period. Or you may see traffic build rapidly at a particular time of day, creating a need for additional employee coverage.
These patterns can help you answer important questions like:
Knowing your busiest hours can help you schedule when customers are most likely to need assistance.
If certain areas consistently experience more traffic, consider whether those areas have enough staff to support customer needs.
Heavy traffic in a particular area can affect everything from customer service to checkout lines. Identifying these patterns early gives you time to plan for them.
A store that is quiet in the morning may become significantly busier in the afternoon. Understanding those transitions can help you build more effective shifts.
This is where the right store traffic solutions can help retailers turn store activity into useful, actionable insights.
Once you’ve identified your traffic patterns, the next step is putting those insights to work.
Holiday shopping can bring increased traffic, longer shopping trips, more customer questions, and greater demand on your team. The goal isn’t necessarily to staff every area of the store with more employees at all times. It’s to make sure you have the right coverage when and where you need it.
Use your traffic data to consider:
If your store consistently sees higher traffic during certain hours, those periods may require additional coverage during the holiday season.
Look at your busiest times and consider how much additional traffic you expect during November and December. Then build schedules that give your team enough support during those critical periods.
Holiday traffic doesn’t always follow a predictable pattern.
A promotion, weekend event, weather change, or last-minute shopping surge can quickly change customer behavior. Build some flexibility into your staffing plan so your team can respond when traffic doesn’t go exactly as expected.
Pay attention to the times when traffic begins to increase.
If your store experiences a noticeable shift from low to high traffic during a particular period, make sure your staffing plan accounts for that transition. You don’t want to find yourself understaffed just as customer traffic starts to climb.
Current traffic data is a starting point, not the final answer.
Customer behavior can change significantly as the holidays get closer. November may bring different shopping patterns, while December can introduce even greater variation as customers rush to finish their shopping.
That’s why it’s important to keep monitoring your store traffic as the season progresses.
Compare your current patterns with what you’ve seen previously. Look for changes in peak hours, high-traffic areas, and overall customer movement. If your assumptions about holiday traffic aren’t matching what you’re actually seeing, adjust your staffing strategy.
The more closely you monitor what’s happening in your stores, the easier it becomes to make informed decisions.
Holiday preparation doesn’t have to mean guessing how busy your stores will be.
Your store is already generating valuable information about how customers shop and move through the space. By taking the time to review those patterns now, you can start identifying where your team may need additional support and when customer demand is likely to be highest.
Traffic counter systems help retailers better understand customer movement, giving teams greater visibility into what’s happening throughout their stores. With that insight, retailers can make more informed decisions about staffing, store operations, and the customer experience.
The holiday rush is coming. Start planning for it now.
Chris Wadsworth, president at Traf-Sys Inc., has over 20 years’ experience in the people counting industry. He holds the accomplishment of pioneering the use of wireless technology into people counting systems. He also worked extensively with the Nielsen company on the nationwide “PRSM” project to quantify and measure in-store shopping metrics. He led the development of the first complete web-based people counting software system platform.
