Foot traffic is the flow of people past and into a shop. Owners use the term loosely for both, but it helps to keep them apart. Walk-past traffic is the number of people who pass the door, which the shop can rarely change and mostly chose when it signed the lease. Walk-in traffic is the number who come inside. Conversion is the share of walk-ins who buy something. Shopping strips, centres and landlords talk about foot traffic because it sets the ceiling on what any shop on the strip can do.
For an independent shop, foot traffic explains a lot of the week's shape: why Saturday morning is wild, why a wet Tuesday is dead, why a new cafe two doors down is either a threat or a boost to everyone.
In practice
A gift shop owner stands at the door with a hand counter for one hour on a Saturday morning. In that hour 600 people walk past, 90 come in, and 63 buy something. That is a walk-in rate of 15 percent and a conversion rate of 70 percent. The same hour on a Wednesday shows 180 walking past, 30 coming in and 18 buying: a 17 percent walk-in rate, but only 60 percent conversion.
Those figures point at different fixes. The Saturday crowd is coming in and buying; the bottleneck is how fast the counter serves them. The Wednesday browsers are not finding what they want, so stock and display are the place to start.
A loyalty card does little for walk-past traffic; strangers do not join a club they have never visited. What it changes is how many of the walk-ins come back. A shop that turns more of its Saturday buyers into regulars needs less walk-past traffic to have the same week, which matters when the strip goes quiet or the rent goes up.