Why Pharmacies Should Look Beyond Footfall

For most pharmacies, people counting has never seemed important — and the reasoning is sound. Visitors arrive because they already know what they need: a prescription, a specific medicine, a word with the pharmacist. Unlike a fashion store, a pharmacy does not need an entrance counter to learn how many visitors become customers. Almost all of them do. But that logic answers the wrong question. The issue is no longer how many people enter the pharmacy. It is what they do once they are inside — and what they walk straight past on the way to the counter.

The pharmacy already has the traffic

Imagine a pharmacy receiving several hundred visitors a day. Many come for one reason: collect their medicine. They walk in, wait a few minutes, receive their prescription and leave. From a traditional counting perspective there is nothing to optimise. Commercially, the important questions remain unanswered. What did the customer pass on the way to the counter? Which categories did they look toward? Where did they stop, and for how long did they stand in front of vitamins, supplements or skincare? Which displays attracted attention but never produced a sale? A simple entrance counter cannot answer any of these.

The stakes are real. Industry analysis identifies health and beauty — skincare, vitamins, supplements and personal care — as the fastest-growing segment in retail pharmacy, and vitamins, minerals and supplements alone are forecast to grow at roughly 7.5% a year through 2031. Every bottle of vitamins or tube of sunscreen also carries a far higher margin than the equivalent value in prescription volume. The front of the store is where the profit lives; the prescription counter is what brings people to it.

From people counting to shopper analytics

The next generation of pharmacy analytics combines anonymous traffic measurement with zone analytics, dwell time, customer flow and view direction. Consider a customer entering during cold-and-flu season to collect medication. That same customer has a potential need for nasal spray, throat products, vitamins and tissues. If those products sit in areas the customer never passes or never looks toward, the opportunity simply disappears. Flow analytics shows the routes customers actually take. Dwell analytics shows where they stop. View-direction analytics shows which displays receive visual attention. Combined with POS data, the pharmacy can finally ask the question that matters: which locations generate attention — and which generate sales?

Product placement should be based on data

Pharmacy categories are naturally connected, which makes placement unusually powerful:

• Cold medicine → nasal spray → vitamins
• Prescription skincare → moisturisers → dermatological skincare
• Pain relief → muscle products → supports and recovery
• Children's medicine → children's vitamins → healthcare accessories

The objective is not aggressive impulse selling. A pharmacy is first and foremost a trusted healthcare environment. The opportunity is to make relevant products easier to discover when the customer already has a related need — and to know, with data, whether the layout is doing that job.

Test instead of guess

The biggest advantage is the ability to experiment continuously. Move a vitamin display from location A to location B and measure traffic, exposure, dwell and sales before and after. Change the skincare layout; measure again. Create a wellness zone; measure again. For pharmacy chains this is especially powerful: test a concept in a handful of stores, prove it lifts engagement and sales, then roll it out across the estate. Vemco Group has been counting people since 2005, today processes over 85 million counts a day across 2,000+ customers, and works to a contractual minimum accuracy of 96% — the precision required when you are measuring a change of a few percentage points in a single zone.

The business case for pharmacies is therefore not "you need to know how many people enter your stores". Many operators can rightly say they do not. The stronger proposition is: you already have the visitors — now understand how they use your store. Contact Vemco Group to scope a pharmacy pilot covering entrance counting, zone dwell, view direction and POS integration.