Dive Brief:

• Shopping in stores didn’t break any records in March — it was more or less the same as March last year — but marked a breakthrough compared to the frozen-stiff sales of February, according to analytics firm Euclid’s U.S. Retail Benchmarks monthly report for March. Traffic declined 1.1% year over year, but increased 5.1% over February, for example.

• Storefront conversion — the number of shoppers who enter a store as a percentage of the total foot traffic — increased to 9% compared to 8.6% year over year and compared to 8.8% in February, the report found.

• And the number of those who “bounced,” or left a store within five minutes after entering it, fell from 10.3% last year and from 8.7% in February to 6.5%— a 12 month low that shows that shoppers had a significantly stronger “intent to buy,” Euclid says. Shoppers stretched out their time in the store in March to 30.5 minutes from 26.1 minutes last year and 22.9 minutes in February, and Euclid said that those longer shopping sessions also translated into more money spent.

Dive Insight:

So this is what retailers and economists were hoping for — that the overly subdued retail environment was a temporary thing, chilled at least in part by the long cold winter. The cheeriest news here is the stronger “intent to buy,” which makes those extra minutes spent in store actually mean something.