Ask a people-counting vendor what accuracy they deliver and you will almost always hear the same answer: "98 to 99 percent." Ask them to put that number in the contract, with a defined measurement method and remediation obligations attached, and the conversation usually changes. Suddenly the figure becomes "typical performance under ideal conditions," and the paperwork offers you an uptime SLA instead — which tells you the sensor was powered on, not that it counted correctly.
That gap between the sales claim and the contractual commitment is exactly where procurement should focus. Vemco writes a minimum of 96% counting accuracy into the agreement itself. In practice, deployments typically run at 98–99% when lighting, store layout and visitor behaviour allow — but the 96% floor is the number you can hold someone to. This article explains why the guarantee is set where it is, how it is verified, and why a slightly lower guaranteed figure is worth more to your business than a higher unguaranteed one.
Because a guarantee has to hold across every entrance in your estate, not just the flattering ones. A wide mall entrance with glass frontage, direct sunlight at 4pm, buggies, trolleys, umbrellas and family clusters walking shoulder-to-shoulder is a fundamentally harder counting environment than a single-door boutique with even lighting. Any vendor can hit 99% at the boutique. The question that matters to an operations director running 80 or 400 sites is: what happens at the difficult 15% of entrances?
Setting the contractual floor at 96% means Vemco commits to that level even at the hostile entrances — and if a location falls below it, that is a breach to be fixed, not an excuse to be explained. Vendors quoting a flat 99% "guarantee" almost never define the conditions, the sample size or the audit method, which makes the number unenforceable. An honest 96% floor with defined verification beats a marketing 99% every time a dispute arises.
A contractual accuracy floor is only credible if the underlying technology and process can sustain it. Three elements carry most of the weight:
Anyone who has commissioned a few hundred counting points will tell you the same thing: the sensor is rarely the problem. The problem is the metre of space around it. The most common accuracy killers in the field are a staff member habitually standing in the count zone during opening rush, a Christmas decoration hung 40cm below the sensor in November, and re-entry loops where smokers or click-and-collect customers cross the line eight times an hour. None of these show up in a lab spec sheet, and all of them can quietly cost you three or four percentage points. This is why a serious accuracy commitment is really a commitment to a validation discipline — zone design, exclusion filters, staff-path handling, periodic re-audits — rather than to a piece of hardware. When you evaluate vendors, ask how they detect the November decoration. The answer tells you more than any datasheet.
Footfall numbers rarely stay in a footfall dashboard. Through VemFusion they flow into POS-based conversion rates, BI reporting, workforce scheduling and, in shopping centres, into tenant benchmarking through VemTenant. Every downstream metric inherits the error of the count underneath it. A 10% undercount does not just misstate traffic — it inflates your conversion rate by roughly the same margin, misleads staffing models, and in a mall context can distort turnover-rent discussions and lease negotiations where both landlord and tenant need to trust the same number.
This is where the difference between 96% guaranteed and "usually pretty accurate" becomes a financial question rather than a technical one. If your data feeds decisions worth millions — refit approvals, staffing budgets, tenant mix — the marginal cost of contractually guaranteed accuracy is trivial next to the cost of one confident decision made on bad numbers. C-suite readers can frame it simply: unverified data is a liability that compounds; verified data is an asset that does.
Whether you buy from Vemco or anyone else, the guarantee is only as good as its definitions. Insist on:
Vemco has been willing to sign up to these terms across retail, shopping centres, airports and public buildings for two decades, which is ultimately why the 96% figure exists: it is the level the company can defend at scale, entrance by entrance, in writing. Most deployments will run comfortably above it. The floor exists so you never have to take that on faith.
Want to see how the guarantee would be verified in your specific locations? Ask us to walk through the audit methodology, the per-entrance validation process and the remediation terms against your actual entrance types — contact the Vemco team here and bring your hardest entrance to the conversation.