Core Definition
The visit funnel arranges the stages from passing by to paying — pass-by, entry, dwell and browse, purchase — as a funnel and reads the conversion rate at each stage. It brings e-commerce's purchase funnel to physical stores, quantifying where customers drop off.
The stages POS cannot see
When sales fall, all POS tells you is that fewer payments went through. It cannot distinguish whether footfall dropped, capture rate fell, or customers who entered left without buying. Problems that call for entirely different fixes end up compressed into a single number.
Laid out as a funnel, the problems separate. Falling footfall points to a location or seasonal problem, a low capture rate points to a storefront problem, and low purchase conversion relative to dwell points to a merchandising, pricing, or service problem. Each stage assigns responsibility to a different place.
How to read the funnel
What matters is not each stage's absolute value but how the conversion rate changes between stages. Comparing conversion rates by time of day and day of week within the same store, and before and after a merchandising change, gives a practical basis for judgment.
Stages can be broken down further. Stepping down to a shelf-level funnel, such as visit to a specific display → exposure → browse → pick-up → purchase, lets you pinpoint problems at individual shelves.
How SAAI Uses It
saai count covers the funnel's first stage (pass-by, entry, and capture rate), while saai insight picks up from there (dwell, browse, pick-up, and purchase conversion). POS records only the last stage, the purchase. saai turns every stage before it into data, revealing where the bottleneck sits, whether in location, storefront, merchandising, or price.
See it in action