Today’s retailers face a complex market, shaped by shifting consumer expectations, economic pressures and supply chain dynamics. Leaders know that, to stay competitive, their businesses need to be two steps ahead, prepared to change course quickly and open to new ways of thinking.

We have long believed that visibility breeds agility. Without insight into what’s happening now, retailers cannot plan for what’s next. This is why we have spent the last 60 years pursuing innovations that give retailers unprecedented insight into the metrics that matter most.

Throughout this period, we have put our decades of experience in retailer technology to work in order to redefine metrics, refine operations and supercharge customer satisfaction.

Understanding traffic patterns and trends is foundational to retail decision making, as it provides essential insights into overall performance. By knowing how many people visit a store, retailers can better comprehend conversion rates, sales results, staffing needs and other critical metrics. Plus, utilising benchmarks serves as an effective means to evaluate performance relative to competition and to track progress over time.

Mission-Driven, Data-Driven

Evergreen Goodwill of Northwest Washington experienced the power of traffic insights in action. The retailer identified Sensormatic Solutions as its analytics partner to help further its mission of eliminating barriers to work and independence. With its sights set on improved labour management, customer journey mapping and conversion, Evergreen Goodwill worked with Sensormatic Solutions to build a reliable, modern solution that could fill in gaps in their operational understanding.

Together, Sensormatic Solutions and the Goodwill team developed and deployed a tailored ShopperTrak Analytics ecosystem that has helped stores to eliminate guesswork from planning, ensuring they have the means to continue serving communities for years to come.

Extending Impact with AI

Another long-time collaborator, Lids, has recently decided to take its traffic intelligence to the next level. After more than a decade of partnership, Lids and Sensormatic Solutions have embarked on a new collaboration to bring Orbit AI to selected stores.

‘We’ve taken our long-standing partnership with Sensormatic Solutions to the next level with the introduction of Orbit AI,’ said Erika Long, director of operations at LIDS. ‘This new technology gives us a clearer picture of how shoppers move through our stores and helps us make smarter decisions to improve their experience. We’re excited to see how these insights will benefit both our business and our customers.’

Understanding a business isn’t just about knowing how many people visit; who those visitors are, what they want and how they shop are just as important. Technology helps retailers to connect the dots from quantitative measures to qualitative understanding, turning numbers into knowledge relating to customer preferences, engagement and decisions.

Sensormatic Solutions’ ShopperTrak Analytics tools take traffic insight beyond counts, shedding light on these hard-to-measure factors and giving retailers and shopping centre owners a better sense of what’s happening within their walls. The National Retail Federation—a leading retail industry organisation – demonstrated the value of these insights at its 2025 Big Show, using Sensormatic Solutions’ ShopperTrak Analytics to track changing trends in the Foodservice Innovation Zone.

“Customer preferences and perceptions change so quickly today, and that includes our own attendees,’ said NRF SVP of Event Strategy Susan Newman. ‘Just like any major retailer, we wanted a data-driven solution that could tell us what our attendees wanted and where they were getting the most value.’

ShopperTrak Analytics’ People Counting solution enabled NRF to track key attendance indicators – such as dwell times, paths and display engagement – in real time, so that organisers could adjust their strategies based on visitor response.

‘We were impressed with the data that ShopperTrak Analytics delivered,’ Newman noted. ‘The insights we received helped us to validate our assumptions about what our attendees wanted and were interested in, and they also helped us to make a powerful case to retailers on the value of people counting technology. ShopperTrak Analytics turned out to be a perfect fit for what we wanted to accomplish within the Foodservice Innovation Zone, and the data it delivered consistently exceeded our expectations.’

Keeping track of merchandise is critical for the efficient operation of retail businesses, yet it remains a challenging task throughout the supply chain to the point of sale (POS). Traditional methods such as manual counts and POS logs often fall short in terms of accuracy and context, and filling in those gaps becomes even more pressing in the face of budgetary pressures and customer expectations.

Brazilian sports and apparel retailer Decathlon knew that it would need to mature its digital systems in order to keep up with customers’ changing needs and increasing market pressures. Poor self-checkout experiences and the need for improved operational efficiency threatened to damage customer satisfaction.

The brand turned to Sensormatic Solutions to address these issues, with the two industry leaders working together to structure a complete consultancy model for radio frequency identification (RFID) POS stations at the self-checkout across the retailer’s Brazilian footprint. With Sensormatic Solutions’ expertise in consulting services and retail expertise in RFID technology, Decathlon has:

• reduced self-checkout time by up to 50%
• improved operational efficiency by 38% year on year (YOY)
• improved inventory accuracy by 3 percentage points YOY
• enhanced customer experience and satisfaction

‘As well as improving operational efficiency, RFID technology has brought significant gains in stock management,’ said Kaio Andrade, regional operations manager at Decathlon Brazil. ‘The improved traceability of products has also proved fundamental in guaranteeing the company's rigorous quality standards.’

Inventory intelligence is also critical to loss prevention and shrink management strategies, with this data sitting at the heart of Sensormatic Solutions’ Shrink Analyzer—a first-of-its-kind solution designed to bring losses into focus. This is especially true in traditionally hard-to-protect categories – such as beauty and transportation – which face unique sets of challenges.

Streamlined Strategies to Stop Shrink

Halfords, the UK’s leading provider of motoring and cycling services, came to Sensormatic Solutions for help in digitalising and managing its diverse footprint while maintaining the brand experience its specialised shoppers have come to expect. After decades of investing in ad-hoc point solutions, the Halfords team was looking for a one-stop provider capable of protecting merchandise and preserving experience.

Sensormatic Solutions worked with Halfords to harmonise and modernise its EAS systems, implement source tagging practices and integrate information from hundreds of stores into a single system. The improvements have been dramatic, with Halfords stores reporting improved customer service, availability and staffing as well as a 9% average reduction in shrink, higher conversion rates, reduced maintenance costs and more precise stock management.

‘In the [first three months since installation], shrinkage rates in [pilot] stores have been 36% lower than in the rest of our estate,’ said James Crowther, support centre profit protection manager at Halfords, of the initial deployment. ‘We have known every time an issue (such as electrical interference) has affected our pedestals, with the majority of issues being resolved remotely without the need for an engineer to visit the store. By using the [shrink management as a service] dashboard we can now more easily distinguish shops that are heavily affected by external theft and have been able to take action to address this.

Shrink Gets a New Look

DOUGLAS Group operates nearly 2,000 stores across Europe, all of which are stocked with high-demand branded beauty products. With a desire for a more standardised loss prevention strategy, the DOUGLAS team chose Sensormatic Solutions as its partner in the fight against retail theft.

The collaboration – which began as a festive season pilot – saw the beauty brand implement a bespoke LP strategy designed by Sensormatic Solutions throughout 301 of its German retail locations. The tailored system implemented across DOUGLAS’ German footprint included Sensormatic Solutions’ industry-leading acousto-magnetic (AM) electronic article surveillance (EAS) sensors and labels, mobile-friendly merchandise protection tools and advertising panels.

Together, these solutions reduced shrink by 50%, improved on-shelf availability, boosted advertising performance and enabled innovative customer touchpoints to streamline experiences. Perhaps most critically, the partnership strengthened staff confidence in their ability to respond when incidents occur. More effective loss prevention strategies and tailored training helped staff to feel confident and safe in the knowledge that mitigation tactics were in place to prevent the need for human intervention in theft incidents.

For the last 60 years, Sensormatic Solutions has been partnering with retailers to develop what they need in order to thrive amid uncertainty. Data has proven to be the crux of modern retailers’ success in these efforts. As we look at the years ahead, we’re committed to continuing to provide the tools retailers need in order to not simply react to change, but anticipate, shape and flourish in it.

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