Store performance reviews in retail are often led by one measure: sales. Footfall, revenue per square foot, year-on-year growth, etc. are easy numbers to report. They are indisputable, so they can dominate a conversation about whether a branch is working. Store value beyond sales doesn’t always get the same attention, because it doesn’t get reported on in the same way.

A store can be fulfilling online orders, saving the business money on returns, hosting a supplier relationship worth millions, or generating some of the highest-margin revenue in the company, and often, hardly any of that is considered when it’s review time.

Why Store Reviews Miss Store Value Beyond Sales

The reason is that a store’s scorecard is typically built around what goes through the till this month.

Things like fulfilment routes, supplier relationships, media revenue, community trust and team development don’t sit on that scorecard, so quite often, none of it is included when a store’s performance comes up in discussion.

Store teams see the detail of what a branch actually does (the returns it handles, the relationships it holds, the customers it converts). They’re the ones doing the work. Central teams see the sales figures, but the rest of what a store does may not get reported back to the support centre.

This pattern shows up elsewhere in retail organisations too: research on customer-facing teams in retail found a significant proportion don’t feel their perspective is valued by the wider business.

Cost pressure on the estate sharpens this further. The introduction of IFRS 16 in 2019 changed how leases are treated in company accounts, following the CFA Institute’s briefing on the standard. Lease commitments that used to sit largely off the balance sheet became a visible liability. That shift made the cost side of a store easier to see and report.

Four Measurable Sources of Store Value Beyond Sales

Click-and-collect converts casual footfall into additional sales. Research from Savills shows that a substantial share of customers who collect an online order in-store buy something else while they’re there, with John Lewis reporting the highest conversion rate of this kind among major UK retailers and a meaningful average spend on top of the original order. That revenue gets recorded as an online sale rather than a store one, even though the store is what made it happen.

Returns work similarly, in reverse. Research from the University of Portsmouth, working with ECR Retail Loss, found that processing a return in person at a store costs roughly 60% less than routing it through a courier — the difference between inspection, transport and damage risk, and a person simply dealing with the problem on the spot. That saving is rarely credited back to the store delivering it.

A store takes on other roles that go beyond selling products. A third, less visible role is about the supplier rather than the customer. UK suppliers pay retailers for shelf position and promotional support, a payment that can run to 10–20% of a supplier’s gross revenue and is governed by the Groceries Code Adjudicator, but only for retailers with grocery turnover above £1 billion a year.

Below that threshold, the practice is more informal. Suppliers might offer free stock, sale-or-return terms, or volume-linked rebates instead of a negotiated fee. In 2026, Scottish brewer BrewDog offered independent convenience stores free stock in exchange for advertising space on delivery vans, shutters, fridges and staff uniforms, turning the physical store itself into the payment. Formal or informal, much of that relationship is managed inside an individual store, by a manager negotiating space and staff building a display. It’s work the store’s own performance figures might never capture.

The fourth role is retail media itself: Co-op’s in-store digital screen network spans more than 15,000 touchpoints across 2,300 stores, sold to advertisers at margins reported as high as 70–90% — higher than the margin on most of what sells on the shelves underneath the same screens.

The Harder-to-Measure Store Roles

Beyond those four, several other roles might be harder to measure, but they’re there nonetheless. For example, store teams hold customer insight that central functions can’t always see. Things like, what gets picked up and returned to the shelf before a sale, or what customers actually ask at the counter. Halfords works with a platform called Hives.co specifically to move that kind of insight from the shop floor into the wider business, rather than letting it stay local.

A store also shapes how someone feels about a brand independent of transactions. Superdrug’s Beauty Playground concept, built around interactive trials rather than a straightforward till moment, is one current example of this in practice. A store can function as a resilience buffer too: when M&S was hit by a cyberattack in 2025, and online services were down for 46 days, the company’s own reporting described store sales as having remained resilient throughout, with physical stores continuing to trade on cash and chip-and-pin while the rest of the business was offline.

Property itself can carry a separate value again. Asda, Morrisons and Lidl raised close to £1 billion combined through sale-and-leaseback deals in 2025, and The Range put ten stores on the market the same way in 2026, in neither case connected to how well those particular stores were trading. Timpson demonstrates a further role, treating stores as a training ground rather than a headcount cost, giving store managers real budget and authority and running training academies inside prisons that feed a genuine leadership pipeline.

And some retailers build trust in ways only a physical presence allows: Iceland’s free home delivery service applies only to in-store purchases, while Manchester’s Myprotein Kitchen treats its community space, rather than its stocked shop floor, as the actual point of the store.

Turning Store Value Into Retail Estate Investment Decisions

Of course, none of this displaces sales performance as a measure. Growth remains the objective for businesses, and every role described above sits alongside that measure rather than against it.

In retail media, most reported numbers belong to the ikes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s and the Co-op, retailers with the scale, data and budget to build that infrastructure.

A business running forty stores cannot build a retail media network quickly. Budget, size and sector all determine which of these roles are realistically available to a retailer. A similar translation problem is explored in the commercial case for CX investment, where the gap is rarely about whether value exists, but whether it has been converted into language a board will act on.

Much of the value described here probably already converts into commercial return. The issue is that it is sometimes untracked rather than invisible: a supplier relationship that survives a difficult year, or a customer who keeps returning because of a service nobody else offers, likely shows up in the numbers eventually, without anyone connecting the outcome back to a store.

Innovation, creativity and personalisation are levers that stores can pull to deliver value way beyond a sale. How a team solves a problem. How a space is used. How a customer is treated as an individual rather than a transaction. All of it creates real value. That value is often intangible, invisible and underestimated.

Retailers who can bring all of those added value pieces into a single view may well start to see their estate as assets to invest in rather than cost centres to monitor.

Key takeaways:

• Before finalising a store closure or investment decision, check whether that branch is a meaningful collection point, returns handler, or supplier touchpoint. None of that may show up in the figures
• Treating customer-facing team time as investment rather than headcount cost is achievable at any scale. The Timpson’s model shows what deliberate authority and training can build over years
• A store’s untracked value is usually not absent, just unattributed. Connecting an outcome back to its source is often more useful than trying to prove new value exists

Resources mentioned:

• Making the Business Case for Customer Experience in UK Retail — how CX value gets translated into board-legible commercial language, a parallel argument to the one made here about stores
• Representing the Customer in Retail: How CX Professionals Find Their Voice — includes the frontline-voice research referenced above
• IFRS 16 briefing — CFA Institute’s explanation of the 2019 accounting change affecting retail balance sheets

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