What is Avia & how it works

Avia is an in-store intelligence platform built by Retailogists. It brings e-commerce-level analytics to physical retail stores — the same depth of insight that online merchants have about their visitors, applied to the shop floor.

The problem Avia solves

Online retailers know almost everything about their customers: gender, time spent browsing, what they looked at, why they bought (or didn't), and what they could have bought.

Physical store merchants, by contrast, typically know only their transaction data — what was sold and to whom. They have no visibility into who walked in, how long they stayed, or why most visitors left without buying.

Physical retail is roughly 10× larger than e-commerce as an industry, yet remains almost entirely unaddressed by modern analytics tooling. Avia is built to close that gap.

How it works

Avia consists of three components that work together:

1. The hardware device

A compact sensor with a fisheye lens, mounted at store entrances. All processing happens on the device itself — on the edge — and no raw video is streamed to the cloud.

This means fast, local processing and strong privacy by design.

2. The Avia mobile app

Used during installation and configuration. Once the device is physically mounted, the app is used to connect it to your network, set the detection height, and define the counting zones.

3. The web dashboard

This is where you access all your analytics, including traffic, conversion, demographics, heatmaps, forecasts, and more.

It is available at app.avia.ai and natively inside Shopify Admin and Shopify POS.

What data Avia captures

For every visitor detected, Avia captures:

Field

Description

Visitor ID

Anonymous ID used to detect re-entries. No facial recognition is used.

Entry timestamp

When the visitor entered the store

Exit timestamp

When the visitor left the store

Gender

Estimated classification, anonymously

Age group

Estimated age bracket, anonymously

From this dataset, Avia derives a wide range of analytics, including:

  • Unique Visitors

  • Conversion Rate

  • Average Session Duration

  • Demographic breakdowns

  • Hourly heatmaps

  • Traffic forecasts

  • Additional store-performance insights

Privacy

Avia is designed with privacy as a core principle:

  • No facial recognition is performed

  • No individual is ever identified — the system knows “a woman, age 25–34 entered,” not “Ishita entered”

  • Data is processed on the device and is not streamed as raw video

  • Avia is fully GDPR-compliant

Shopify integration

Avia is the only in-store intelligence solution natively integrated with Shopify.

For Shopify POS merchants, this means:

  • The dashboard is accessible directly within Shopify Admin and on iPad through Shopify POS

  • Avia can access your store address, enabling weather data in forecasts

  • Avia can access your product catalog, inventory levels, and sales history

  • Combining Shopify’s transactional data with Avia’s non-transactional data unlocks insights that neither source could provide alone

Avia also works with non-Shopify POS merchants, although the Shopify integration provides a stronger out-of-the-box experience.