Using Heat Maps to Track Buyer Preferences

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.

About the Author

Beth Stackpole, contributing writer | Contributing Editor, Automation World

Beth Stackpole is a veteran journalist covering the intersection of business and technology, from the early days of personal computing to the modern era of digital transformation. As a contributing editor to Automation World, Beth's coverage traverses a range of industries and technologies, including AI/machine learning, analytics, automation hardware and software, cloud, security, edge computing, and supply chain. In addition to her high-tech and business journalism work, Beth writes an array of custom editorial content and thought leadership pieces.

Sponsored Recommendations

Rock Quarry Implements Ignition to Improve Visibility, Safety & Decision-Making

George Reed, with the help of Factory Technologies, was looking to further automate the processes at its quarries and make Ignition an organization-wide standard.

Water Infrastructure Company Replaces Point-To-Point VPN With MQTT

Goodnight Midstream chose Ignition because it could fulfill several requirements: data mining and business intelligence work on the system backend; powerful Linux-based edge deployments...

The Purdue Model And Ignition

In the automation world, the Purdue Model (also known as the Purdue reference model, Purdue network model, ISA 95, or the Automation Pyramid) is a well-known architectural framework...

Creating A Digital Transformation Roadmap Using A Unified Namespace

Digital Transformation has become one of the most popular buzzwords in the automation industry, often used to describe any digital improvements to industrial technology. But what...