Needless to say, retailers constantly strive to achieve sustainable growth and profitability. To that end, they need business intelligence to better understand customer behavior, optimize retail space and ultimately improve business outcomes. In this regard, heatmaps can play a key role. This article looks at what retail heatmaps are and what’s needed to make them work.
Retailers face challenges from various fronts. Retail loss and shrinkage continue to be problems for storeowners. But also, retailers constantly struggle to find out more about their customers – how they move about in the store, what attracts them and which parts of the store they stay longer at. Retailers need these insights to optimize their stores, staff accordingly and provide a better customer experience. This is especially important at a time when competition becomes more intense from offline and online peers.
“Retailers struggle with understanding how customers actually move and behave in physical stores. Common pain points include poor store layouts, underperforming zones, long queues, blind spots in staff allocation, and decisions based on assumptions instead of data,” said Koen de Jong, Founder and CEO of Visionplatform AI.
“Physical retailers often struggle with limited data visibility compared to online channels. Traditional CCTV systems primarily serve security purposes and do not provide actionable insights into customer behavior. This leads to several persistent challenges, such as limited behavioral data, inefficient design decisions, poor staffing optimization and difficulty measuring change,” said Angel Cai, Marketing Manager at Milesight.
How heatmaps can help
Luckily, retailers can address these challenges with heatmaps. Heatmaps are visual tools that show activity intensity by using colors. Typically warm colors, for example red and orange, are used for high activity levels, and cool colors such as blue and green are used for low activity levels. In retail, heatmaps can provide insights such as foot traffic, dwell time, product interaction, and sales performance by area, in the process answering questions such as where do customers go first, which aisles are ignored, and which displays attract the most attention. With retail heatmaps, storeowners can get actual data on customer movement and browsing patterns, rather than second-guessing how customers behave in the store.
“Heatmaps help by visualizing foot traffic density, movement patterns, and dwell areas over time. This makes invisible behavior visible,” de Jong said. “Retailers can see which areas attract attention, which zones are ignored, and how layouts or promotions influence flow. The value is not the heatmap itself, but the operational decisions it enables.”
“Heatmaps … provide visual and quantitative information about how customers move and behave within the store. Instead of assumptions, retailers obtain objective data on high-traffic areas, dwell areas, bottlenecks, and dead spaces. This allows them to optimize layout, improve customer flow, and support operational and commercial decisions based on actual behavior, not intuition,” said Tamer Mohannad, Regional Sales Manager for Middle East and Africa at SCATI.
What’s needed to make heatmaps work
Heatmaps work by way of collecting data from various types of sensors. The software then processes these data to provide customer paths, dwell times and other insights. The sensors can be security cameras of different kinds, for example wide-angle, fisheye or fixed cameras. As for processing, it can take place either in the camera itself or on a local server or NVR. Cai of Milesight cited their heatmapping solution as an example of how advanced cameras combined with powerful edge processing can work wonders for retailers.
“Milesight’s
360° Panoramic Fisheye Network Camera and
AI TrueColor Q Series Camera (Dome/Bullet/Turret) are well suited for heatmapping in retail environments, combining wide-area coverage with accurate AI-based people analytics,” she said. “In Milesight’s solution, heatmapping analytics are processed directly within the camera using built-in edge AI. This edge-first approach offers several advantages, including higher accuracy where Analytics are performed before video compression or transmission; lower bandwidth and storage demand where only structured metadata needs to be sent upstream; and better scalability, which is especially suitable for multi-site retail deployments.”
She adds that while analytics are executed within Milesight cameras, the results remain system-agnostic and can be delivered to compatible back-end platforms for visualization and further business analysis.
Other than security cameras, other sensors can work with heatmaps as well. V-Count, for example, has a heatmap solution using stereotypical image-based people counters, which can be ideal in markets facing privacy and compliance issues.
“There are uses cases where retailers use CCTV cameras and integrate that data into their system, and the system tries to give you an overall heatmap. Now, the thing here is with that technology, you probably cannot penetrate into certain markets; the reason is they have GDPR compliances,” said Pritam Dey, Sales Manager for Middle East and APAC at V-Count.
He adds: “At V-Count, what we do, we do not integrate with any CCTV cameras. We have our own sensors, and inside the sensor we have the OS that analyzes everything. And to the cloud, it only passes the raw metadata. That means only the binary numbers – only the overall numbers – are processed, not raw image or anything.”
Security as well as business intelligence
While heat maps are mostly associated with providing business intelligence in retail environments, they can play a role in securing store premises as well.
“Heat maps are often associated with business intelligence, but they also provide direct value to security teams. Beyond measuring foot traffic, they help identify patterns of lingering or crowding in sensitive areas, detect atypical behavior by time slot, and understand where incidents or situations of operational stress are recurring. This allows for better adjustment of surveillance, optimization of camera placement and coverage, and prioritization of verification based on actual evidence and patterns. When security and operations share this visibility, the store gains preventive capabilities and improves response without increasing manual workload,” Mohannad said.
Cai of Milesight echoes those remarks. “In practice, many retailers use heatmapping as a shared tool between operations and security – enhancing customer experience while strengthening situational awareness and risk prevention,” she said. “From a security perspective, heatmapping helps identify abnormal crowding, unusual movement patterns, or congestion in sensitive areas such as entrances, checkout zones, or restricted spaces. These insights enable security teams to respond earlier and deploy resources more effectively.”