By Melissa Fares
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Marshal Cohen has religiously visited the same stores every holiday season since 1999.
But rather than snapping up bargains and favorite gifts for friends and family, the chief retail industry adviser is there to scrutinize the purchasing habits of others as online shopping upends the retail business.
Major shifts in consumer behavior and preferences have forced Cohen, who works for market research firm NPD Group, and other retail analysts to approach their jobs very differently than two decades ago.
"If you were to try and replicate research methodology, or even store observation, in today's world, you've got a problem," Cohen told Reuters. "It's no longer good enough to just look at store traffic or parking lot counts."
Cohen and his peers need to get it right because their insights, reported to investors and retail clients, influence marketing, move share prices and guide investment decisions.
A record number of U.S. consumers spending more online, coupled with a condensed holiday shopping season and year-round discount wars among retailers, has forced analysts to get creative, with many shifting away from old-school tactics to measure a company's overall performance.
Instead of simply asking shoppers why they left a store empty-handed, analysts are probing the effect of online giant Amazon.com Inc, asking whether customers started Christmas shopping in July on Prime Day, now a major event in the annual retail calendar to rival Thanksgiving weekend's Black Friday.
Calculation of sales per square foot is giving way to a tally of how many Instagram-native, exclusive and private fashion brands are offered on a retailer's sales floor and website, and analysts -- rather than simply seeing how many bags a shopper leaves with -- are now counting how many younger millennial and Gen Z shoppers frequent a store and whether they make a purchase.
Craig Johnson of Consumer Growth Partners says that traditional metrics such as foot traffic, average selling price, and average basket size can often still be highly indicative of what's happening in stores.
But other retail analysts said online shopping and a slew of services like "buy online, pick up in-store" can hinder the ability to estimate a retailer's conversion rate - a traditional measure of the proportion of visitors who make purchases.
Brian Field, senior director of global retail consulting for ShopperTrak, part of retail data firm Sensormatic Solutions, said it was particularly difficult to figure out if traffic reported by retailers came from people buying items in-store or shoppers picking up online orders. "It is kind of synonymous with the fact that retailers are reporting blended sales, which include sales online and sales in-store together," Field said.