Heat mapping technology is helping brick and mortar retailers track customer behavior in real time.

One of the best—or worst, depending on your tolerance—things about the online shopping experience is the ease with which retailers can zero in on browsing patterns and serve up more items that you might want to buy. And now there’s technology to give traditional brick and mortar shops more evolved feedback on buyer preferences to do the same.

Prism Skylabs is using security camera images with thermal imaging to generate real-time heat maps of a shop’s layout and customer traffic, and then translating the data into a dashboard that can help store managers make adjustments in a variety of ways.

The heat maps identify which areas of the sales floor get the most use. They can also get as specific as identifying which items on a display table receive the most attention from shoppers. The data, paired with sales information, can help determine when items attract shoppers but perhaps aren't enticing enough to buy. Retailers can then determine whether the issue was missing sizes, pricing, quality or something else. 

Heat map or no heat map, let the shopping games begin.