Unlike the earlier days the Retail Shop’s layout, design, placement of a product, discounts to be offered etc are some of the important criteria that dictates a customer’s behavior. The closed circuit camera inside the stores helps the retailer to track what are the products that are attracting more customers, what are not, the places inside the Retail Shop with high traffic etc. This data collected are then used by turning the information into Heat Maps. In-Store Heat Mapping thus help in proper optimization of the store. The network cameras used for heat mapping are very much pocket, friendly, flexible and are also scalable. The data collect from these cameras are an effective mode to provide a solution to heat mapping.
Heat mapping can broadly be divided into two types, these include;
- Mouse tracking heat mapping
- Eye tracking heat mapping
The mouse tracking heat maps are widely used by most of the companies because it is less expensive. The data collected from mouse tracking heat maps are the one that are collected from actual customers or visitors inside a shop on the other hand the data collected from eye tracking heap map are gathered after sampling out the visitors into small groups that means the result of this mapping system is a distorted one. However the data collected through eye tracking heat mapping after considering the samples are a much accurate one than the mouse tracking heat mapping.
Functions of In-store Heat Mapping:
In-Store Heat Map functions in the following ways and help the retailers;
- There are various spots inside the stores that in Retail terminology is termed as the hot spot, dead areas or bottlenecks, the heat maps contains picture of this areas and help the retailers to gain a clear idea about the store.
- The data in the heat map that are collected from the closed circuit or the network cameras inside the shop are used to highlight the retailers with information about the traffic flow inside a store. These data are stored and can be collected from anywhere through the network.
- These help the Retailers to have an up to date knowledge about the store’s performance, how the customers are behaving, whether or not their employees are fulfilling the job of customer’s satisfaction effectively.
- These data can further be compared with that of the previous year’s data whether it is a loss or profit the current year.
- The heat mapping system use different colors to demarcate different values like traffic flow inside the stores are marked by one on the other hand the product attracting more customers having another color.
- The content of that attracts most of the customers are to be kept at the top page, to intrigue the customer’s need.