The fastest way to write a weak retail analytics tender is to ask for "accurate footfall counting" and leave it there. Every vendor will say yes. The differences that actually cost you money later — reconciling counts across 200 stores, exporting clean data into your BI stack, proving a supplier will still be around in year five — live in the questions most buyers forget to ask. What follows is the set of questions that separate a demo from a deployment.
Ask vendors to state accuracy as a contractual minimum, not a marketing figure. There is a meaningful difference between "our sensors are 99% accurate" and "we guarantee a minimum of 96% in your stated conditions." Vemco, for instance, contracts a minimum of 96% and typically delivers 98–99% when lighting, store layout and visitor behaviour allow. That phrasing matters: any supplier promising a flat 99% everywhere is either ignoring physics or hoping you won't audit it.
Follow up with the questions that make the number real:
A practitioner note: accuracy degrades most at wide entrances and in direct sunlight near glass frontages. Ask specifically how the vendor handles those two cases, because they are where in-house pilots quietly fail.
A counting platform that can't feed your existing systems becomes a second dashboard nobody opens. The tender should force clarity on integration before signature, not during rollout.
For system integrators, the last two questions decide whether a project is a week of configuration or a quarter of workarounds.
Hardware choice is where long contracts go wrong. A vendor tied to a single proprietary sensor line can force a full hardware refresh the day that line is discontinued. Prefer suppliers who are device-independent and sensor-agnostic, so the analytics layer survives changes underneath it. Vemco's software has run this way since 2005, which is worth noting when you're assessing whether a platform can outlast three hardware generations.
Concrete questions to include:
Public sector buyers and regulated enterprises rarely have free choice on where data sits. Ask whether the platform offers hosted or private cloud, where the data centre is located, and how personal data is treated — most people-counting is anonymous, but confirm it rather than assume it.
Then require the compliance evidence in writing: relevant certifications such as ISO or SOC 2, a stated SLA with uptime commitments, and a named support model rather than a shared inbox. Ask for the escalation path when a store goes dark on a Saturday, because that is when you'll need it.
A tool that works in a pilot store can buckle at 300 sites reporting simultaneously. Scale is not a feeling; ask for evidence.
Ask for reference customers of comparable size — and then call them. Written references are curated; a fifteen-minute phone call reveals what the implementation actually felt like.
The licence line is the least interesting number in the quote. Force each bidder to itemise installation, recalibration visits, firmware updates, support tiers, integration work, and the cost of adding stores after go-live. Ask what a mid-contract price increase looks like and whether it's capped. Many tenders are won on headline price and lost on year-three change requests.
Don't leave these questions as open prose in an RFP; weight them. Give real points to a contractual accuracy floor, documented integration, sensor independence, compliance evidence and demonstrated scale. Vendors answer sharply when they know a question carries marks, and you get comparable responses instead of five brochures written in different dialects of optimism.
If you're drafting or reviewing a retail analytics tender and want a supplier who can answer every question above with contract language rather than adjectives, talk to Vemco about your requirements — bring your store count, your integration targets and your accuracy threshold, and we'll respond against them directly.