Catchment Analysis Checklist and Footfall Counting Log for Store Locations

A catchment is the area from which a store draws most of its customers. Understanding it — who lives and works there, how they move, what else they can buy nearby — is the foundation of a site decision. This checklist turns a site visit into evidence you can compare across sites.

1. Define the catchment

Decide how you will define it before you go: walking minutes for a neighbourhood store, driving minutes or kilometre rings for a destination store. In dense Indian cities, physical barriers — highways, railway lines, rivers, gated layouts — cut catchments more than distance does. Mark them.

2. Access and visibility

• Approach roads, one-way streets, signals, medians and U-turns: can customers actually reach the frontage from both directions?
• Public transport stops and the walking route from them.
• Two-wheeler and car parking, paid or free, and enforcement.
• Visibility of the frontage from each approach and at night; signage rights and restrictions in the lease or local rules.

3. Demand

• Residential density and type — apartments, independent houses, informal settlements.
• Daytime population: offices, colleges, hospitals, markets.
• Population and income figures: use official releases you can cite, and record the source and year. Census tables may be old for fast-growing areas; if you combine them with newer local data, say so rather than mixing silently.

4. Count footfall properly

Footfall at the frontage is the most useful number you can collect yourself — and the most often collected badly. The footfall log in the workbook asks for date, day type (weekday, weekend, holiday or festival), time slot, count and the counter's name, and calculates average counts by slot for weekdays and weekends.

1. Count the same time slots on at least two weekdays and two weekend days.
2. Count people passing the frontage on your side of the road, in both directions.
3. Note weather and events — a festival or a local market day distorts counts.
4. Count at existing stores the same way, so you have an analogue to compare with.

5. Supply: competitors and co-tenants

List direct competitors, indirect competitors and complementary stores with distance and price position. Complementary stores (a supermarket next to a pharmacy, a café near a bookstore) can matter more than competitors.

6. Risks

• Construction, metro work or flyovers planned nearby — these can cut access for years.
• Waterlogging history in the monsoon.
• Zoning and permitted commercial use; title and building approvals.

Bring it together

Feed the evidence into the site-selection scorecard: footfall informs the footfall score, the catchment checklist informs catchment fit, the competitor list informs competition. PlacePulse draws catchment rings, places your competitor and footfall data on the map and keeps the source and date of every layer visible.

Worked example (illustrative)

A pharmacy chain counts footfall at a candidate frontage on Monday and Wednesday evenings (6–8 pm) and on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Weekday evening counts average about 640 people passing; weekend mornings are lower. A railway line 400 metres north cuts the catchment, so the team draws it as a 10-minute walk to the south and east only. A competitor pharmacy sits 250 metres away, but a supermarket next door draws evening shoppers — a complementary co-tenant. The findings feed the scorecard.

Common mistakes

• Counting only on one day.
• Rings that ignore barriers.
• Mixing population figures from different years without saying so.
• Ignoring daytime population.
• Treating every nearby store as competition.