How Foot Locker uses location to power its omnichannel experience
Reaching customers at the right place and right time drives meaningful engagement. Yet most brands don't have the tools to act when intent is highest.
Foot Locker partnered with Radar to close that gap. Using geolocation, they're now acting on real-world customer behavior, and seeing measurable lifts in app engagement and customer loyalty.
In this webinar, you'll hear directly from Brittany Eby, Sr. Digital Product Manager at Foot Locker, on how they built a smarter in-store experience and what it's unlocked for their team.
Read the full interview below:
Radar overview
Gabi McLaughlin
Thank you everyone for joining today. Today we'll be talking about how Foot Locker uses location to power its omnichannel experiences. For the agenda today, we're going to be going over a quick Radar overview and then retail trends that we're seeing. Then I'll introduce Foot Locker and we'll jump into our conversation on how they're using location to help power omnichannel experiences.
Wanted to start with a quick overview of Radar for folks who might be unfamiliar. We are a location infrastructure and intelligence platform. On the infrastructure side is our geofencing platform and our Maps APIs that developers use to build different location-aware experiences like store locators and trip tracking. And then on the intelligence layer side we have out-of-the-box solutions that help turn your location data into real business outcomes across three main areas. The first is engagement, triggering the right message at the right moment. Second is protection, verifying users' locations and identifying fraudulent behavior. And third is operations, being able to track deliveries, pickups, and workers in real time. We work with many amazing retailers, and that's going to be the focus for the conversation today, but we also work across a lot of different industries like restaurants, gaming, travel, and logistics. I think the conversation today will also be really relevant for some of those other industries as well.
I'm Gabi. I am an Enterprise Customer Success Manager here at Radar, and I have the pleasure of working with a lot of the great customers that you see here. A big part of my role is partnering with these different teams to help them maximize the value that location can bring to their businesses and help them with the unique challenges they face within their industries. I get a front row seat to how some of our most innovative retailers are thinking about engaging with their customers.
3 trends we're seeing
Gabi McLaughlin
I wanted to share a couple of key insights that we've been seeing in the retail industry over the past couple of months.
The first one is AI and geolocation. As businesses begin to leverage AI to enhance their personalization strategies, they're looking to location data to be a key input into how they engage with their users. For example, they want to understand how they can use location to generate more impactful marketing campaigns and even start to predict customer and workforce behavior.
The second is geolocation as an omnichannel lever. We all know that omnichannel shoppers are going to be our most valuable and loyal customers, and retailers are really looking to increase the percentage of omnichannel shoppers that they have with location by unifying their online and in-store shopping experiences.
And finally, acting on real-time intent. Brands want to understand how they can act on these location signals where and when it matters most. They know that when locations and experiences are delivered at the most impactful moments, these can really help drive conversions and improve a customer's experience.
Foot Locker overview
Gabi McLaughlin
Many of our retailers have been really interested in learning more about these topics, which is why I'm super excited to be sitting down with Foot Locker today. They've been one of the leaders in this space, consistently raising the bar for how retailers think about location and customer experiences. One of the people leading the charge at Foot Locker in this space is Brittany Eby. Brittany, thank you so much for joining us today. Really excited to have you here. Would you mind giving a quick introduction of yourself and your role at Foot Locker?
Brittany Eby
Thanks for the intro, Gabi. I'm excited to be here and thanks for having me. My name is Brittany Eby. I'm a Senior Product Manager at Foot Locker, owning the customer-facing iOS and Android mobile apps. My background is in product management, e-commerce, and omnichannel experiences that support product and brand discovery, both in-store and online.
A major part of my work has really been about determining how digital experiences can enhance and support in-store shopping. At Foot Locker, our mobile app spans across three banners — Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker, and Champs Sports — and we serve customers globally across North America, Europe, and soon in June we will also be in Asia Pacific, in Australia and New Zealand specifically. I'm really excited to be here and talk with you all about location and how it has shaped our product journey over the years.
Gabi McLaughlin
Thanks, Brittany. I know we've been working together for about a year and a half now. Would you mind giving the audience a little more context on what you all were trying to solve for and how location originally became a priority for the team?
Brittany Eby
Our digital experiences weren't adequately acknowledging or supporting the in-store journey, and our customers didn't really understand why they should open the app while they were shopping in our stores. Even though the app had real value, it wasn't clear or compelling in that moment for the guest to use the app. Without that motivation, they just weren't engaging. And we really didn't have insight into when app users arrived in stores or which locations they were visiting. So these were all the challenges that we were facing and trying to solve over the years.
Topic 1: Engaging customers in store
Gabi McLaughlin
Thanks, Brittany — thanks for giving the intro. We can jump into our conversation on how you're using location to power that omnichannel experience. A couple of discussion topics we'll go through today: how you're using geofencing to power those omnichannel experiences, some of the unexpected benefits and impacts you saw from that experience, and how you're using location-based marketing to really engage customers in store. So we can get right into it, Brittany, with our first couple of questions here.
Foot Locker today is using geofencing to detect store visits to trigger an in-store experience. You all launched the new app and Store Mode around the same time. Would you mind walking us through that journey — what the in-store experience was like beforehand, and what gap you were trying to close with this experience?
Brittany Eby
Before Store Mode, the app experience was the same everywhere, whether you were at home or in store. There was little to no in-store functionality within our mobile app, and there were no clear transitions from online browsing to shopping in a physical store. That highlighted a few gaps we were trying to close — one being the acknowledgement of when a customer is physically in store. We were missing out on a really high-intent moment with customers that were most engaged and ready to shop with us.
As we look at our current journey, we began by launching a completely new app, which was exciting in itself. We rebuilt it from the ground up with modern designs and front-end technologies, making the overall experience feel more seamless and up-to-date for our customers. Shortly after, we prioritized Store Mode as the experience we want to use when guests arrive in store, having a trigger there for engagement. Our app behavior automatically adapts now based off location. Customers immediately feel that relevance and purpose when they open the app. Our guiding principle throughout all of that was that we wanted the app to respect where the guest was and behave based off of their location.
Gabi McLaughlin
That's a lot of big changes all at once, but it sounds like you guys navigated that seamlessly, which is awesome. You talked a lot about how Store Mode is triggering when somebody walks into the store and is really respecting where they are to show the right content that makes most sense for them. Would you mind walking us through what actually happens when somebody walks into that store and what features become available to them when they have Store Mode turned on?
Brittany Eby
As you mentioned, the customer is physically walking into one of our stores, whether that's Foot Locker, Champs, or Kids Foot Locker. Assuming they already have the app installed and they have location services or Bluetooth services enabled, the app will detect store entry through Radar geofencing and Bluetooth beacons. If the guest has push notifications enabled, they receive a push notification welcoming them to the store. If they don't, and they open the app when entering a store, Store Mode is triggered automatically. The first thing they see is a location-specific welcome screen, with a nice animation that continues into Store Mode in a dedicated tab in the bottom navigation.
Once they're in, there are a few different tools they can leverage. One is probably our biggest feature — scanning a Shoe Barcode to check size availability and send a try-on request to an associate directly. They can also send try-on requests through a browse-style functionality we call Shop by Size. They can use this to see in-store inventory filtered by their size, but they can also filter on attributes like color and gender.
Flx Rewards is also huge for us. Customers can easily see their Flx Rewards information within Store Mode. It showcases the loyalty barcode, their points, and the Flx Cash that they can use for redemption at checkout, and they can apply that to their store order. Having that visibility upfront makes the rewards feel more real, and we've seen it encourage customers to spend more with us.
If you scroll down on the Store Mode landing screen, you'll see any items ready for pickup from past orders. You'll also see product recommendations based on what's available in store, and a lot of those are based on items already in your bag online or in your save-for-later. We're really showcasing products that customers have already shown interest in. We were really intentional about the features that we wanted to showcase within Store Mode.
Gabi McLaughlin
I really like how you all worked the loyalty into Store Mode. A lot of retailers have a hard time figuring out how to make their rewards relevant for users at the right time, and I think this is a really perfect way to do that. When somebody is ready to check out, they already have their loyalty points pulled up, and you're able to connect those purchases as well.
Brittany Eby
We've definitely heard store associates mention customers using and leveraging it. So we're excited to hear that feedback.
Gabi McLaughlin
I know you mentioned you have Store Mode live for all three banners in the U.S. What's the next step from here? Is the team looking to expand this internationally or add new functionality?
Brittany Eby
Store Mode is live today across our three U.S. banners. This year, our focus is learning from the U.S. rollout and scaling the experience globally across Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Next year we'd like to expand in-store recommendations to include things like accessories that pair with a shoe a guest is scanning. Once we do our global rollout this year, we'll focus more on cross-category recommendations.
We also want to think about post-try-on communication. Right now it's pretty simple — we let the customer know we're looking for their shoe in the back and to hang tight. But we'd like to give more real-time updates and status of where their shoes are while they wait, because it can take up to 10 minutes, which can seem like a long time in store.
Our biggest focus both this year and next will be driving awareness. Today the experience is largely associate-led — our Stripers, which is what we call our in-store associates, are educating guests on how to use the feature. We want that to be more natural for our customers to use on their own and intuitively.
Topic 2: Unexpected outcomes
Gabi McLaughlin
Speaking of the Stripers — your store associates — I know you all saw some unexpected engagement and usage of Store Mode. What was the most unexpected way that you found folks were using Store Mode once you rolled it out?
Brittany Eby
The most unexpected thing was just how organically the associates picked this tool up and started using it within our stores, beyond its original customer-first intent. We quickly saw associates referencing Store Mode in conversations with other Stripers and with guests. They were using it to track size availability and even submitting try-on requests on behalf of our customers. What this behavior reinforced for us was that the value of Store Mode was there because it was proving to be simple, intuitive, and reliable enough to be embraced naturally by our Stripers and to fill some of the gaps they were experiencing as associates.
Gabi McLaughlin
That is super interesting and a really positive outcome that was kind of unexpected. In terms of the experiences they're using Store Mode for, can you talk a little about how associates would have done these tasks day to day before, and how they're doing them now with Store Mode?
Brittany Eby
Before Store Mode, associates didn't have an easy way to see inventory by size. Now they can quickly help customers based on size and color preferences as soon as customers walk into the store, which has been really helpful for family shopping — especially during back-to-school when families come in wanting matching shoes for multiple people.
During peak holiday times, we'd often run short of handheld devices on the floor. Having Store Mode available on any device gave us more devices that had the same capabilities to send try-on requests to the back room. That broader accessibility really helped with peak times when we had a lot of customers coming in.
On the operations side, Store Mode has eliminated the need for printed catalogs and made inventory visibility much faster and easier, which has been helpful for return-to-vendor requests. Going into it, we knew we didn't want Store Mode to replace associates — we wanted it to become a support and storytelling tool for them and for our customers. Overall, it's improved communication between customers and associates by giving both sides a common shared source of information that helps everyone get answers faster. That reduced friction ultimately builds confidence in the app as a reliable in-store tool.
Gabi McLaughlin
That's amazing — definitely a really interesting outcome there. I know you mentioned before that you had done surveys with customers and tried to understand what functionality would be best for them, and I think it's really interesting that it ended up being helpful across the board. Now that you know more about how store associates and customers are engaging in the physical store, how will that inform how you go about future projects and just thinking about how people are actually moving about through the stores?
Brittany Eby
Customers value being able to see in real time whether something's available in their size. That builds trust and transparency. What we heard from customers is that they feel confident that what they see is truly what we have, and we're not holding sizes in the back. This process taught us that both customers and associates will naturally adopt tools when they see clear value and an opportunity to solve real problems.
We also learned the importance of getting a concept into the real world early. We tested and learned alongside our associates without needing everything to be perfect from day one. Obviously there was a lot we wanted to do that we couldn't do, so figuring out what that first experience really looked like and what we got out there to learn was important — making sure we had the features we wanted without sacrificing the experience.
To do that, our team really had to spend time in stores with our research partners, observing real behavior, talking with customers directly, and validating ideas through firsthand insight rather than making assumptions. That will apply as we move forward and continue to build on it.
Gabi McLaughlin
It sounds like you were able to work across a lot of different teams within the organization to make this possible, which is really great. When you have that cross-team collaboration, you end up coming up with a really amazing product, which it sounds like you guys did.
Brittany Eby
We had a lot of support from various teams, which was nice. Just being able to tag along with our research team and go into the store, being part of the interviews, was really special — it's not something we get to do on a day-to-day basis. This was our first time building a feature that was really meant for the store experience. So being a part of that was really cool, and we're grateful that the teams were so open-minded and brought us along for that.
Gabi McLaughlin
Out of curiosity, those research groups — are you going into a hand-selected group to give a survey, or going into stores and asking customers who happen to be there?
Brittany Eby
More the latter. We went into a couple of stores with our research partners and interviewed customers in store who volunteered their time. We rewarded them with a gift card for answering some questions about the experience. We had a prototype they could actually hold within their hand and play around with, so they got a really close-to-real-time experience with it. We were able to see how they were using it and engaging with it. We spent about five or 10 minutes with each of them.
Topic 3: Meeting customers at the right place and time
Gabi McLaughlin
We can jump into our next topic, which is focused on meeting customers at the right place at the right time, where they are. To start — it sounds like you've already incorporated location-based marketing into the Store Mode experience. Would you mind walking through how you've incorporated that so far and how it's helping customers start to engage with Store Mode?
Brittany Eby
Right now we're focused on intent and timing with our location-based push notifications, triggering them when users are about a mile away from our stores to surface relevant in-store promotions — especially tied to our Flx loyalty program and special offers that run on Fridays related to Flx. We also use these same notifications to introduce Store Mode to guests, encourage discovery of in-store features, and check in with them after they've left a store to see how their experience was and ask them to fill out a quick survey. The key for us is being relevant at the right time. These notifications should act as entry points into the experience, not just traditional campaign messages like our general push notifications.
Gabi McLaughlin
I think folks can see the screenshot of that one notification you were just describing — where you walk in and you get the notification to actually engage with Store Mode. So beyond just that notification and maybe the Flx one you referenced, what is the team hoping to do next with location-based marketing? Are there other types of engagement you're trying to drive?
Brittany Eby
Beyond what's live today, we're going to expand our location-based marketing through more geo-targeted push notifications tied to high-impact moments. In May, we have notifications tied to the World Cup, pop-up events in New York City, and a Harlem Community Day. Those are going to be exciting community moments. We also plan to communicate when we have store refreshes or reimagined stores opening for those in the area, as well as key brand events like New Balance Grey Day.
We'll also test larger geofences, going up to a 1,000-meter radius around these locations to drive more incremental reach and engagement, with success measured primarily through click volume and click-through rates.
As we expand, we still believe location-based experiences should feel supportive and valuable, and never intrusive to guests who choose to share their location with us and opt in to push notifications. Everything remains guided by customer consent and the clear value they receive in exchange for sharing location and push notification access. That forces us to be a little more intentional with how we use those capabilities within our app.
Gabi McLaughlin
It's definitely great that you all are value-driven and just trying to make sure it's adding to the customer experience — not just paying customers with notifications regularly, but making sure they're actually relevant to where they're located and what their intent might be at that moment. And I always — when I'm walking home from work and walking by the Foot Locker, I like to get the notification to come into Store Mode and try on some new shoes. It's a great excuse to do that.
It sounds like you're tracking engagement on the notifications you have live. I know we have the Airship integration set up. Other than open rates, how do you go about making sense of that data and your other conversion metrics, and what does success look like to you and your team?
Brittany Eby
Right now we're focused on measuring overall engagement and its impact on in-store behavior, as well as ensuring we have reliable location data and geofences that trigger Store Mode. Radar has helped us build confidence in accurate store arrival detection, and we have the integration with Airship — our push notification provider — and those analytics seamlessly flow in so we can measure things like app open rates and engagement.
We also follow up with guests by sending them a push notification after they've visited a store and used Store Mode, asking them to do a quick survey on their experience. That's another key success metric for us — a more qualitative one — that helps us understand whether Store Mode influenced them to make a purchase while in store, or encouraged continuous behavior of using the app or visiting a store again. We really want to see how it impacts the lifetime value for that customer.
Over time we'll shift more toward measuring Store Mode adoption, repeat engagement, and how those behaviors drive future sales. With the maturity of our customer data platform, we're hopeful we'll get there soon and start to tie Store Mode to in-store sales attribution, which we're not currently doing.
While our app has more potential to have broader reach, we know that even though our omnichannel customer base is small, those customers do consistently spend more with us. We're going to focus on growing that base because engagement from customers who shop both in-store and in our app is critical for long-term business growth. Customers who have the app downloaded and visit our stores spend more with us annually.
Future of location for retailers
Gabi McLaughlin
That sentiment is similar across a lot of our retailers as well — they know that population of app users and in-store shoppers is super valuable, and they're trying to learn more about these experiences to do exactly what you guys are doing, which is grow that population of customers. Before we jump into Q&A, just one last question: where do you actually see location signals heading as a tool for retailers over the next couple of years, and are there any opportunities you think some brands might be missing?
Brittany Eby
The future of location is about providing context and shaping experiences based on where the customer is. The experience for someone near or inside a store should feel distinct from someone shopping at home. This was an opportunity we were once missing out on that maybe other brands might still be missing out on, and we feel very fortunate that we took advantage of it. Over time, this will enable more natural app usage where digital and physical stores operate as a single connected ecosystem rather than separate, disjointed experiences. That was the biggest opportunity we saw as a brand that maybe others could benefit from as well.
Q&A
Gabi McLaughlin
Thank you, Brittany. We can go ahead and jump into our Q&A now. We've already got some folks sending questions in, but if anyone has any other questions, definitely feel free to send them in — we've got about 10 minutes left. Let me take a look. Maybe we can start with one question.
In terms of the rollout, I know it all ended up really successful and the functionality is working great for folks. But what was one challenge you and the team faced as you were implementing and testing this? How did you overcome it, and would you have any recommendations for someone thinking about this type of implementation?
Brittany Eby
We faced multiple challenges. I know it sounds like we did it seamlessly, but there were a lot. One was around having accurate location coordinates. We convert our store addresses into geo coordinates within Radar, but because most of our locations are inside shopping malls, those coordinates didn't always map cleanly to a geofence. We had to do some manual cleanup and adjust the data so it would work for our use case. Originally we were thinking of doing 50-meter geofences, but we expanded that to 100 to account for a larger footprint.
Another challenge was overall cellular connectivity in stores, particularly in malls where stores are sometimes located on lower levels. That's something we have limited control over because it depends on cell phone carrier. While we offer in-store Wi-Fi as a backup, the bandwidth isn't always there for a lot of people to hop on the network. So a combination of our store location data and the natural ebbs and flows of connectivity within stores were probably the two biggest challenges we faced.
Gabi McLaughlin
That makes sense. A lot of our customers also have a similar experience, especially with the location data. Not everyone has the mall experience — some do — but it's hard to get all of your location data in one place and ensure it's accurate and updated regularly. I think you guys navigated that pretty seamlessly, although obviously it takes time to get that data updated. That's great advice for anyone thinking about getting started with the implementation as a first step.
We've got a couple more questions in here. This one is interesting — what, if any, hurdles did you have to overcome with store staff thinking that Store Mode was coming to be a replacement, as opposed to a tool like you mentioned for them?
Brittany Eby
We did a lot of early trainings with our store teams. We spent time providing training materials, walking them through the prototype, and starting with a pilot store audience before we expanded nationwide. Starting with the pilot and learning about their concerns first was beneficial before handing it over to everyone with the training.
Our training really educated associates: this is a tool to support our guests in store. We want you all to be champions of it, to use it yourselves and understand how it works. Customers are still going to come in and ask you personally for shoes to try on, and whether you use Store Mode in that conversation or not is up to you. We reinforced the need for communication between Stripers and customers as still very important to the core experience of Store Mode.
Even when a user sends a try-on request, the request itself includes the user's name and where they're located in the store, but it still requires an associate to bring them the physical shoe and to interface with the customer. So Store Mode acts as a tool, but the way we trained associates made it clear that it was meant to facilitate discussion rather than be a replacement.
Gabi McLaughlin
How long did you go through that training process with the store associates?
Brittany Eby
We did training by region and rolled out region by region over the course of two to three months. We spent about a week or two with each region. They had the training at least three or four weeks in advance so they could understand it before it was in their hands.
Gabi McLaughlin
We've got a couple of questions in here about engagement. Folks are really interested in how much engagement you're seeing and what features are being engaged with most. I'm sure you don't have the stats pulled up in front of you, but maybe if you could speak to which features you're seeing get the most clicks and how you go about tracking that.
Brittany Eby
We've seen a lot of visits overall. Since we launched in June of last year, we're close to about half a million Store Mode visits. About 80% of those visits actually engaged with our scan and try feature, so that's the most engaging feature.
We also see about 40% of visits use Shop by Size. While not as engaging as scanning, we still see a lot of customers using it. The funnel to send a try-on request is also pretty strong — about 50% of users that engage actually go on to send a try-on request to an associate. Those are our top two most-used features, and they're also the ones at the top of our Store Mode experience, which makes a lot of sense.
Gabi McLaughlin
Those are definitely very unique features, which I think is really interesting for some of the other retailers thinking about what features to actually launch. It's interesting to know which ones end up getting the most engagement — and for somebody new to Store Mode, that's where you could start, with just one of those features and then build up from there.
I think we've got time for probably one more question. In terms of the rewards program, I know you mentioned you've kind of incorporated that into Store Mode. How else does the team plan to incorporate this throughout the Store Mode experience and notifications, and what's the impact you're hoping to have on the rewards program itself?
Brittany Eby
An interesting stat with our mobile app is that about 90% of our users are logged in with Flx Rewards, so our reach for Flx is really strong, and leaning into that more in the coming year or two will be powerful. We've seen the mobile app is a strong lever wherever Flx 2.0 is live — that's the most recent version of our rewards program, and it offers things like Flx Cash.
Continuing to surface how points can actually be actionable into rewards will be important. While customers can convert points to cash, they can also convert them into things like extra boosts for launch reservations and raffles. We want to keep educating on Flx Rewards as a whole, whether in store or online, and have it more tied to the mobile app — since our mobile app customers are our most loyal guests and are often logged in receiving those benefits.
We want to think more strategically about how we incorporate it across the entire experience, not just within Store Mode but within our online experience as well, and have Stripers in store talk about it more with our guests. We want it to be an identifying point at purchase as well — because if customers aren't identifying themselves at purchase as an Flx member, they could lose out on points and rewards even if they're there to use. We want it to be a conversation point earlier on, rather than post-purchase when it's too late and they can't use them.
Gabi McLaughlin
In terms of conversion, it's much easier for you all to track how that engagement turns into a purchase in store and online by using Flx Rewards. So I think that's a great outcome as well.
Thank you all so much for sending in all these questions, and thank you so much, Brittany, for joining us today and taking the time out of your day to go through all these questions with us. Like I mentioned, such a pleasure to work with you and the team, and looking forward to all the different projects we're going to do together. I have this QR code pulled up too, so if anyone would like to learn more about Radar, feel free to scan it. We'll send out the recording afterwards for everybody. Thank you all for the time, and hope everyone has a good rest of their day.
Brittany Eby
Thank you for having me, Gabi. Thanks everyone for joining.