How to measure footfall in a shop

Most shops make rota and layout decisions blind. When to double-staff, whether the new window display did anything, whether Tuesday mornings justify opening at nine. The honest answer for most of these is that nobody actually knows, they're going on memory and gut feel, which is another way of saying they don't know at all.

Your cameras are already counters

The entrance camera sees every visitor who walks in. It's just never been asked to count them. Footfall & Dwell Time turns that feed into numbers: visitors by hour and day, and how long people spend where, without a door sensor or a beam counter fitted anywhere.

Dwell time is the half most counters miss

A beam counter knows someone crossed the threshold. A camera knows they spent four minutes at the new display and walked straight past the sale rail. Dwell time is what turns a raw footfall count into a layout decision, because a count alone can't tell you what people actually did once they were in the shop.

1. 01

   Point Svid at the entrance

   Create an account at app.svid.ai and connect the entrance camera, plus any floor cameras where dwell matters.

2. 02

   Switch on Footfall & Dwell Time

   Enable the check on those cameras. It reads the whole video rather than a single moment, so it's counting the pattern, not guessing from a snapshot.

3. 03

   Let it run through a normal week

   A single busy Saturday isn't a baseline. A week of ordinary trading is.

4. 04

   Read the pattern and act

   Match the rota to the real peaks, and check whether layout changes actually move the dwell numbers rather than assuming they did.

What to do with the numbers

Quiet hours stop being a mystery once they're a number: open later, or use them for stock and cleaning instead of staring at an empty shop floor. Peak hours get the staff they need instead of whoever happened to be on the rota that day. And a display or layout change gets a proper before-and-after read on dwell, rather than a manager's impression of whether it felt busier. If the problem right now is a queue rather than a quiet Tuesday, that's a live, in-the-moment question, and reducing checkout queues covers it separately.

Can I measure footfall with my existing CCTV?

Yes. The entrance camera becomes the counter. There's no door sensor or new hardware to fit, just a check switched on for that feed.

What's the difference between footfall and dwell time?

Footfall counts visits, dwell time measures how long people spend where. A count tells you traffic; dwell tells you what people did with it, which is what actually informs a layout decision.

How accurate does footfall counting need to be for rota decisions?

Rota and layout decisions run on patterns and comparisons, not a turnstile-grade census. What matters is whether Tuesday mornings are consistently quieter than Saturdays, not the count to the last visitor.

Does it track individual customers?

No. Counting doesn't identify anyone, and Svid deliberately does no people tracking, re-identification, facial recognition or biometric IDs.