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- bts: mark ryski
In partnership with
mornin’ merry makers 📊👥🚪📈⏰
mark ryski sent me an advance copy of his new book and i inhaled it like a bag of popcorn. partly because i’m a nerd, but mostly because i’ve been fixated on one of retail’s most maddening riddles:
staffing imbalance.
you know the scene. you walk in desperate for help, and there’s one poor soul juggling twelve customers, sweating through their polo. or worse… the opposite, five associates clustered in a retail improv troupe, gossiping while you try on jeans alone.
in past jobs, i got obsessed with solving this. we tracked traffic counts, layered on data, tried to forecast the “just right” number of associates like goldilocks with a clip board.
too few and your conversion tanks.
too many and you’re setting money on fire while employees wonder what they’re even doing there.
mark’s whole career has basically been building the missing guide to this very common dilemma. his book finally lays out the science behind what most brands still treat like astrology: the relationship between traffic, labor, and why some stores hum while others flop.
in today’s letter, you'll learn:
→ why store traffic is retail's ultimate demand signal (and often overlooked metric)
→ how important it is to schedule labor to traffic
→ what makes certain stores "super converters" that crush the rest of the chain
→ the conversion killers most retailers don't even realize they're creating
bts q&a: mark ryski
I started my career working in retail stores, as an associate, store manager and then as marketing manager. I was trying to understand what impact our advertising and promotional investments were having when I realized I needed to track store traffic – not sales outcomes. That started me on a 30 year journey.
For the last 22 years, I have dedicated my career to helping retailers apply insights from store traffic and shopper conversion analytics in more than 20 countries.
It seems remarkable that there would be so much to say about something as simple, and fundamental as store traffic.
When I wrote my first book, When Retail Customers Count (2005) it was the first book ever written dedicated to the topic.
Five years later, I wrote, CONVERSION - The Last Great Retail Metric (2011) which was a deep dive on how retailers could improve in-store conversion rates.
When the COVID-19 pandemic smashed into the retail industry like a meteorite in 2020, the retailing world changed. I knew that I needed to update the key concepts for the realities that all retailers were facing in the post-pandemic world and remind retailers of just how precious and valuable their store traffic is and that’s what inspired me to write Store Traffic Is a Gift.
Q3: your data shows that every retailer can improve their in-store conversion rates. what's the most common conversion killer you encounter?
Not scheduling store labor to traffic.
For offline sales, conversion only happens in the physical store – not head office!
Frontline store teams have the greatest ability to influence conversion performance so scheduling this precious labor to the precious store traffic is critical.
Other notable conversion killers: poor merchandising, bottle necks at check-out, disengaged frontline teams focused on tasking vs. serving shoppers.
Q4: you've identified something called "super converting stores." what makes these locations so special?
Every retail chain that I have analyzed has SUPER CONVERTERS. These stores convert significantly more store traffic than any others in the chain.
If you think of the physical store as being its own ‘conversion algorithm’, it’s the alchemy of all in-store factors that create this performance, including merchandising, product mix, and most importantly, the frontline store team.
The store team has the greatest impact on conversion performance.
Q5: you argue that most retailers schedule their labor wrong. what's the fundamental mistake they're making and how should they approach staffing differently?
The fundamental mistake most retailers make is allocating and scheduling labor based on sales vs. store traffic.
Sales only represent the shoppers who made a purchase, and completely ignores the shoppers who visited, but left without buying. The fact is, when a shopper enters a store, the store team should assume that the shopper is there to make a purchase, and their role is to facilitate that purchase.
Q6: how do you see ai changing the way retailers analyze and act on traffic data?
AI is impacting everything, but it relies on one critical ingredient – clean data.
Store traffic counts are the foundational data that contextualizes everything that happens in the store. It should be a key input to any AI aspiration that seeks to improve performance in physical stores.
Q7: what’s one thing you wish more brands understood about store traffic?
Store traffic is the ultimate demand signal in physical retailing.
As retail executive Clint Mahlman said, “store traffic is the ultimate denominator to which you compare everything you do in your stores.”
I believe that retailers/brands in general underestimate the value and preciousness of their store traffic. This only becomes clear when you start to measure it.
retail rapid-fire round
fave retail store of all time?
Harrods in London
retail center that gets it right?
Yorkdale Mall Toronto
can’t live without retail tool?
Store traffic counter :-)
retail metric you obsess over?
Traffic counts and conversion rates
your signature style of merrymaking?
Travel and golf
best retail advice you've ever received?
When tasking…always remember that the most important task is serving the customer
what do you love about working in retail?
Human beings interacting with human beings
connect with mark
if you've ever struggled with labor planning, conversion rates, or figuring out why some stores crush it while others don't, you need to follow mark and grab his new book!
🔗 link up here:
to me, the big takeaway is this: store traffic isn’t random chaos that you just hope for. it’s a love letter from your customers, showing up at your door. so you either write them back with the right team at the right time, or you ghost them.
and no one likes being ghosted even on halloween…
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