Definition: An Electronic People Counter is a device with a sensor mounted near the entrance. These devices are referred to by many different names, such as Pedestrian Counters, Door Counters, Customer Counters, Visitor Counters and Retail Traffic Counters. Each time a pedestrian passes through the entrance, the sensor of the people counter will sense the customer and that customer will be counted. The most tried and true technology is the infrared beam technology. These are invisible beams that are emitted across the entrance. The absence or presence of the beams allows the sensor of the customer counter to determine when a pedestrian has passed through the sensor’s path.


Why Count? A store’s sales figures are only half of the equation for success. You must also know the store’s traffic figures to fully understand your business.

Here’s just a few things that can be done when you know your traffic history:

• Schedule sales staff more efficiently
• Analyze your advertising campaigns
• Compute your “close ratio”
• Compare weekday traffic with weekend traffic

Counting People vs. Buying Parties: Depending upon your environment and your needs, you must decide if you want to count individual people or 'buying parties.' An example of a buying party is a husband and wife or a family. In the retail environment, many times it is useful to count a husband and wife or a family as one potential sale. In other environments, such as public libraries, it is usually required that they count every single person, even if they are children.

Because our EPC-MAG1 People Counter counts the number of times that the door physically swings open, it inherently counts buying parties. That is because a husband and wife or a family will usually hold the door open for each other and enter on one door swing. So if you want to count buying parties, then the EPC-MAG1 People Counter may suit your needs.

All of our people counters except for the EPC-MAG1 People Counter use infrared beams to sense and count the traffic. These infrared beam models have the ability to count individual people or buying parties. They can do this because of our Sensor Sensitivity Delay. This is a user-defined delay. When a pedestrian is sensed by the infrared beam, the system will count that individual and then ignore all traffic for that user-defined delay. So, if the wish to count buying parties, then you may want to set the Sensor Sensitivity Delay to, say, three seconds. This will usually be enough time to allow a husband and wife to enter and only increment the traffic total by one. If you have many families entering, then you may want to increase this delay by another second or second and a half.

If you wish to count every single person, then we suggest that you set the Sensor Sensitivity Delay to its minimum level, which is 0.5 second. The minimum value of a half of one second allows the person to be counted more than once by counting the person's arms, legs, purses, etc., yet short enough to reset so that it is ready to count the next person who will enter behind the previous person.

That is why the infrared beam people counters gives you the flexibility to count individual people or buying parties.