Online retailers are able to generate enormous amounts of information about shoppers — quickly  and inexpensively. Store-based retailers often wish that it was so simple for them to obtain such data.

Consider these observations from Dawn Klingensmith, reporting for the Path to Purchase Institute:

“Compared to online retailers who gather consumers’ ‘digital crumbs,’ bricks-and-mortar stores are ‘disadvantaged’ and only want the kind of insights that E-commerce sites ‘have in spades,’ according to a New York Times report. Location tracking and location-based profiling could help stores improve and personalize shopping experiences. ‘That’s our core mission statement right now – we want to be Google Analytics for offline retail,’ says Michael Minar, a data scientist at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Euclid, a company that worked with Nordstrom.”

“The higher-level approach, called macrolocation, looks at the store and the world beyond to understand traffic patterns, whereas microlocation is interested in individuals inside the store, says Eric Newman, VP of products & marketing for Digby, a mobile commerce and marketing technology provider based in Austin. Macrolocation technology notes the number of people – or rather the number of devices – that pass by a store as well as those who enter it. Since dwell times are also noted, stores can assess whether window displays are engaging and if they draw people inside. Dwell times also indicate how long shoppers stand in line at checkout so retailers can adjust staffing levels.”

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