Do you track revenue per visitor? How about conversion rate? Or do you focus on driving more foot traffic and counting sales results?
Most retailers can recite their average sale without thinking. It’s on every receipt.
Conversion is harder. It lives with the shoppers who left without buying. Not just the ones you saw walk out. The ones you didn’t.
Any chance you’re counting the wrong thing?
In 1943 the problem was bombers. Too many weren’t coming back. So the ones that did were studied and the bullet holes mapped. Wings, fuselage, tail — shot up. The engines, mostly clean.
The answer seemed obvious. Armor where the holes are.
A statistician named Abraham Wald saw it differently. Through a series of memos he pointed out that every hole being counted was on a plane that survived. A hole in the wing was a hole a plane could fly home with.
So where were all the missing engine hits?
They were on the planes that never returned.
It’s called survivorship bias, and once you see it, it’s everywhere. Fund databases quietly drop the funds that closed, so the category average only counts the ones that lived. People say they don’t build houses like they used to — standing in front of the ones that didn’t fall down.
The data isn’t wrong. It’s just from the survivors.
High-ticket retail runs on survivor data. Average sale. Units per ticket. Margin. Every one of them is a bullet hole on a plane that made it back.
Every high-ticket sales opportunity happens twice. Once when they walk in, and once when they walk out.
The sale records one of those moments. The other one leaves no receipt.
That’s why more traffic is such a tempting fix. It’s armor where the holes are. Send more planes and more planes come home. More don’t, too. And the numbers you watch look fine the whole time.
The answer isn’t in the shoppers who became customers. It’s in the ones who left unseen.
Wald never saw the planes he was right about.
Cheers,
Jerry
P.S. Your average sale is the bullet holes — the half of revenue per visitor you already know. Conversion and Revenue Per Visit (RPV) is the other half, and it’s out there with the planes that didn’t come back. Trakwell counts both. Get your RPV and see where it lands against peers.
