Store Traffic Is a Gift
The Retailer's Guide to Converting Visits into Sales
Empowering retail leaders to market, merchandise, and manage their way to higher sales, Store Traffic Is a Gift is an instructive business manual.
Mark Ryski’s insightful sales guide Store Traffic Is a Gift is about turning store visits into profit.
Grounded in retail analytics, the book explains how brick-and-mortar stores often fail to sell to their visitors, even some who intended to make purchases. Targeted at industry professionals and drawing on twenty years of industry knowledge, it shares techniques for transforming visitors into buyers. It includes store traffic data from enterprises of varying sizes to show corporate leaders how to gather, interpret, and act on the information they receive. It also discusses empowering store managers and employees to generate more sales. Misconceptions, such as that driving traffic leads to sales increases, are handled with scientific rigor too.
Illustrative observations abound, as with the story of a retailer who once saw hundreds of thousands of visits a day, but whose visits evaporated in the face of COVID-19 restrictions. These are used to flesh out connections between store traffic and sales and are followed by advice for converting visitors into buyers. Examples of stores that succeeded in becoming superconverters, that got their teams on board with their new methods, and that used data to inform trial-and-error approaches to factors like refining merchandise localization further flesh out its ideas. Online competitors, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the future of retail are also addressed.
While the book’s abstract examples, as with those involving stores 1, 2, and 3 and products A and B, impede its delivery, its more detailed examples of the ins and outs of retail amplify its credibility. For instance, it observes that managers get bonuses for minimizing staffing to reduce costs but notes that the trade-off may not be worth it: Smaller staffs can also mean lost sales, lagging customer service, diminished customer satisfaction, and the loss of a store’s reputation. The book is didactic in its approach, and its prose prizes clarity, explaining advanced subjects like labor allocation and conversion rate optimizers in straightforward terms. Some of the book’s takeaways feel like filler, though, repeating points from the preceding short chapters without need. Graphics, charts, tables, and other visual aids appear for further support.
Making a strong case for how store traffic connects to all elements of a business’s success, this astute retail leadership guide is about capitalizing on store traffic and maximizing sales.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
