High St to get Father’s Day, World Cup boost, ShopperTrak

Father’s Day and the World Cup are set to give a boost to shopper traffic on the High Street this weekend, with footfall expected to be up 2% on the daily average on Saturday, according to ShopperTrak.

Traffic will then dip on Father’s Day itself (Sunday), down 5% on the daily average, which follows the trend that has been observed since 2012. Steve Richardson, UK & MEA Director at ShopperTrak, says: “We know that both Father’s Day and the World Cup mean shifting patterns in shopper traffic - for example, our data from the 2014 World Cup showed that footfall generally fell on each match day, but the day after a European national team was knocked out of the tournament, general retail traffic rose +3.41% on the daily average, as shoppers then got back to usual shopping behaviours. With both events taking place over the same weekend, the impact on footfall will be even more pronounced."

Planning will be critical to store success over the World Cup period, he states, especially when factoring in differing kick-off times, which will affect European nations’ shopping habits in different ways. For example, in the last World Cup, footfall was worse affected during day time kick-offs, while conversely European footfall rose 30.6% on tournament rest days.

“Data-insight driven retail groups will have crunched their past sales and traffic data to build up a clear picture of what to expect during Russia 2018, factoring in match times, impact of team success or failure, weather predictions and World-Cup marketing plans,” Richardson concludes.