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Retail site selection analysis
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United States
Retail site selection software built on foot traffic
Compare candidate sites on weekly foot traffic, where visitors come from and how nearby competitors perform. Start with a free analysis of your shortlist.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with the CCPA and applicable US state privacy laws.
Retail site selection software should show you how a location actually performs before you commit to a ten-year lease. Huq measures visits to any US address, including competitor stores, with no sensors or cameras. Compare candidate sites on foot traffic, drive-time catchments, residents vs visitors and nearby brands, and check overlap with your existing stores. More than 1,000 locations are manually validated in each of Huq's 35 markets twice a year.
See Huq's retail site selection software in action
This overview tours the Huq platform. For retail site selection, watch how you drop candidate sites onto the Explore map, switch on layers such as travel time, retail centers and brand locations, and compare the results. Then see how a shortlist moves through a Project and into a report you can take to your real estate committee.
- Catchment and drive time: where each candidate's visitors come from and how far they travel to shop.
- Cross-visitation: how many visitors a new store would share with your existing ones.
- Brands and retail centers: which brands and center types surround each site, so you can judge co-tenancy.
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is retail site selection software?
Retail site selection software helps retailers decide where to open stores. It brings together the evidence a real estate team needs to compare candidate locations: how many people visit the area, where those visitors come from, which competitors and anchors sit nearby, and whether a new store would pull customers from your existing ones.
Traditional approaches lean on radius rings, traffic counts and analog stores. They're useful starting points, but they estimate demand rather than observe it. Visit data adds what people actually do: which sites they visit, when, for how long and how often they come back.
Huq brings that together in one platform: footfall, residents vs visitors, drive-time catchments, and brand, POI and retail center data for any address. Map gaps in your network with the White Space Analysis tool, and track each opportunity from shortlist to committee in Projects.
What's in your retail site selection analysis
01
Weekly foot traffic by site
Visit trends for each candidate site, so you can compare demand week by week and spot seasonal swings before you sign.
02
Catchment and drive time
Where each site's visitors actually come from and how far they travel, not who falls inside a radius ring.
03
Competitor benchmarking
How each candidate's foot traffic, dwell time and visit frequency compare with nearby competitors and your best-performing store.
04
Overlap with your stores
Cross-visitation across up to 10 location pairs, showing whether a new site adds customers or shares them with existing stores.
What a retail site selection analysis shows
Here's what the free comparison looks like for a shortlist of three candidate sites. Every chart comes from the Huq platform and exports to a report.
01
Weekly visits across three candidate sites
Three sites on one chart. Site B draws steady visits all year, while Site C peaks over the holidays and drops back in January.
02
Where each site's visitors come from
Primary and secondary catchment zones for each site. A site drawing visitors from well beyond a 3-mile ring may serve a wider area than the radius suggests.
03
Overlap with your existing stores
The share of visitors each candidate shares with your nearest stores. Low overlap points to new customers; high overlap points to likely cannibalization.
Retail site selection software with coverage across the US
Huq covers any address in the United States: shopping centers, main streets, downtowns, strip malls, competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened yet. No counters, sensors or cameras needed.
Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year, and data refreshes weekly.
How it works
Step 1
Tell us your locations
Add up to five addresses in the form. Your own stores, candidate sites or competitors.
Step 2
We run the analysis
Our team maps each location from observed visitor data.
Step 3
We walk you through it
A short call to take you through what the data shows and what it means for you.
Why retail teams use Huq for site selection
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: a 19.5% median error across published markets, against a 30% healthy threshold.
- Huq's customers give it an NPS of 42.
- Trusted by 300+ organizations across 35 markets, including the global insights, research and location intelligence teams at Nike, Adidas, JD Sports and Samsung.
huq's platform gave us valuable data to support a key decision on potential new sites.
Dan Brogden
National Sales Manager, Puccinos
Who it's for
01
Retail chains of any size
From five-store retailers planning their next site to national brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail real estate owners
Show shopping center performance, support leasing and get the tenant mix right, for landlords, asset managers and brokers.
03
Investors and private equity
Check how retail brands and assets actually perform before you buy, and monitor them after.
Everything Huq measures, in one platform
- Foot traffic: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily foot traffic, trends, period-over-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Trade area and travel time: trade areas by ZIP code, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power, available in selected markets.
- Behavior: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Foot traffic density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping center and retail center types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category, available in selected markets.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, trade areas, shopping centers, retail centers, brand locations, industries and ZIP codes), White Space Analysis, and Projects for monitoring many locations and reporting to stakeholders.
- Delivery: the platform, CSV or Excel exports, monthly PDF location reports, and data feeds as Parquet and CSV files into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets.
- Cadence: data refreshes weekly.
Frequently asked questions
How do you choose site selection software?
Start with the decisions you need to make. Some tools focus on GIS mapping or sales forecasting; Huq focuses on observed visits, drive-time catchments, nearby brands and overlap with your stores. Ask every vendor how they validate their data. Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year.
How does site selection differ between retail and manufacturing locations?
Retail sites depend on customers: how many people visit, where they come from and which competitors sit nearby. Manufacturing sites are chosen mainly on labor, logistics, utilities, land and incentives. Huq covers the retail side, measuring foot traffic and catchment at any address, so it suits stores, restaurants and consumer-facing property rather than plants or warehouses.
Will a new store cannibalize my existing stores?
Huq's cross-visitation analysis shows how many visitors a candidate site shares with your existing stores, across up to 10 location pairs at once. JD Sports, a UK retailer, used Huq's catchment and cross-visitation insights and saw 25% more precise catchment analysis and 18% lower new-store location risk.
What's included in the free retail site selection analysis?
Send us up to three candidate sites. We'll compare their weekly foot traffic, where their visitors come from, and how they benchmark against nearby competitors or your best-performing store, then walk you through the results. There's no commitment and nothing to install.
How often is the foot traffic data updated?
Weekly. Each site's visit data refreshes every week, so you can compare seasons and follow trends rather than relying on a single snapshot. That matters in site selection, where one busy month can make a weak location look strong.
Can I analyze a vacant site or a competitor's store in the US?
Yes. Huq works on any address across the US, including vacant units and competitor stores. Draw the site on the Explore map or pick it from the brand locations layer. No sensors, cameras or site access are needed, so you can assess a location before a broker tour or a lease offer.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoAbout Huq
Huq is a location intelligence company. We turn anonymised mobile location data into footfall, catchment and visitor insight for any place, so retailers, property owners and local authorities can make decisions on evidence.
See how your locations really perform
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.