Does Home Depot Or Lowe's Get More Foot Traffic?

To have a successful business, you need to be easily accessible to your customers. If your business is in e-commerce, you should be the first site that pops over your competitors when folks are searching for a product that you offer, for example. With regard to physical retail locations, their success can be measured by how many people actually walk through the door. 

A store's ability to get enough shoppers inside can have a direct impact on sales. This way of tracking customers is called measuring foot traffic, and it can indicate how many pass by a particular retail location and more specifically, how many enter the store, according to Shopify.

Calculating foot traffic can determine many factors that can make the business both more efficient and profitable. For one, it can show in what seasons foot traffic either increases or decreases. This also helps to make decisions regarding how much staff is needed during peak seasons and even during which time of the day. This in turn can ensure that enough staff is present when it's busy to create smoother sales, provide better customer service, and consequently help to keep labor costs low when foot traffic is minimal. These numbers can also aid in measuring how you match up against the competition. To that end, when it comes to the two major home improvement chains – Lowe's and Home Depot — how do they compare when it comes to the most foot traffic?

There's really no question that when it comes to home improvement retail chains, Home Depot and Lowe's are the two major competitors. At first glance, it might be hard to pick out any significant differences between the two. However, there are some particular business approaches that seem to separate the rivals. Although they essentially sell a lot of the same items, Home Depot caters to not only the do-it-yourself customers, but also to professionals. With services like their Pro Desk, home building pros can receive discounts and other perks. Also, according to Insider, Home Depot seems to surpass Lowe's when it comes to the online market. Especially during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Home Depot offered easy pick-up services as well as same-day deliveries in some cases.

With regards to foot traffic numbers, although the two are neck-and-neck, there's an obvious winner. From the information collected by SafeGraph, the above graph displays foot traffic numbers at both Home Depot and Lowe's from January 2019 up until July 2022. These findings take into account the number of customers that have walked into the store and spent an average of over four minutes within the location. Although Lowe's takes a slight edge over Home Depot in the spring of 2020, with numbers climbing over 1.3 million visitors, it's plain to see that Home Depot has the greatest overall foot traffic compared to Lowe's during this span of time.