A Swedish forecourt chain: from gut feeling to network playbook

A Swedish petrol station chain with over 100 sites wanted one answer at network scale: of everyone who stops, how many actually come into the store? Petrol retail lives on that step, from the pump, past the forecourt, through the door, and yet most chains only ever see the till side of it. The chain decided to measure the whole step, everywhere.

The rollout

Each station was zoned into pumps, EV charging, store and restaurant, and measured with small installations. That kept the rollout a logistics exercise rather than a construction project: no trenches, no rebuilds, the same setup repeated across the network. From day one, every site reported the same metrics on the same definitions, which is what makes numbers comparable between a motorway site and a town-edge site.

What the network learned

The capture rate is lower than operators assume, and the spread is the opportunity. Pump-to-store conversion is often around 20 percent, and it varies widely between sites: in one measured period, stations ranged from 8 to 55 percent. That spread is the point of measuring a network. The question stops being “is 20 percent good?” and becomes “what are the 55 percent sites doing that the 8 percent sites are not?”, and the best forecourts become the playbook for the rest.

The store is a destination in its own right. The dependency rate ran as low as 10 to 15 percent, meaning only 10 to 15 percent of store visitors also filled up. Staffing, layout and promotion decisions look different once that is visible: the store is not an appendix to the pumps, it is a business with its own customer flow.

EV charging changes the funnel. Charging visitors split into three measurable groups: charging-only, converted into the store or restaurant, and lost. Time spent charging is store opportunity, and now it is measured per site, so the network can see which stations turn charging minutes into store visits and which let them drive away.

Why it worked at 100+ sites

Multi-site measurement stands or falls on consistency, and that is an architecture question. The measurement is anonymous by design and identical at site one and site two hundred, so the privacy review happened once and the rollout never reopened it. The forecourt playbook, from capture rate to site-by-site benchmarking, is covered in full on petrol stations & convenience retail and for gas-station chains; the metrics themselves are in data deliverables.