Every day, retailers lose customers they know exist but can’t see visiting their store. Here’s why that’s costing more than you think.

Picture this: A customer walks into your competitor’s store instead of yours today. You’ll never see them on your sales report. They won’t show up in your analytics dashboard. But since that customer has visited your store in the past and could have done so today, he represents a loss.

Welcome to the world of ghost customers – the invisible revenue that haunts every retailer.

The Numbers That Keep Retailers Awake at Night

The average grocery shopper visits 5.2 different stores each month and uses 3.6 different channels to shop. Think about what that means: for every customer transaction you see, there are four others happening somewhere else.

When a customer chooses a competitor over you, there’s a 40% chance they’ll never return to your store. That single “ghost visit” – the one that happened elsewhere instead of with you – represents an average loss of around €60 (and this is reported to the CEE market, as European numbers can be much higher). Multiply that across your potential customer base, and you’re looking at a revenue phantom that dwarfs most marketing budgets.

Why Traditional Retail Creates More Ghosts

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most retailers are in the attention business when they should be in the needs business. They’ve become obsessed with competing for focus with flashier displays, louder promotions, more aggressive marketing. But while they’re fighting for attention, they’re missing the fundamental question: What does this customer actually need right now?

A customer who can’t find what they need doesn’t just leave empty-handed. Research shows that more than 50% of customers who experience a stockout will simply shop elsewhere – and potentially never come back. You’ve just created a ghost customer: someone who needed you but couldn’t find you ready to serve them.

Making the Invisible Visible

The most successful retailers of the next decade won’t be those who grab the most attention – they’ll be those who predict and fulfill the most needs. This is why you need a solution that can focus on customer needs, not just inventory data.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Predict needs, not just orders: Understand what customers should buy based on their patterns, not just what they historically have bought
• Integrate external intelligence: Weather, events, seasonality, and market trends all influence what customers need
• Transform reactive fulfillment into proactive preparation: Have what they need before they know they need it

The ghost customers aren’t actually ghosts – they’re real people with real needs shopping somewhere else because we weren’t ready for them.

The €60 Decision

Every day, every customer makes a simple decision: where to shop for what they need. If you can predict and prepare for that need, you capture the €60. If you can’t, you create another ghost customer. The question isn’t whether you have ghost customers – you do. The question is: what are you doing to bring them back to life?