There’s no doubt about it, Click & Collect is huge!
The vast majority of customers visit the digital flagship store as part of their path to purchase, whether that's in-store or online. With the increasing awareness and focus that retailers have put on delivering the "Omnichannel" promise over the last few years, eStar is starting to see early adoption initiatives, tried and tested, begin to settle into mature solutions.
One of these is Click & Collect, which, as the name suggests (and everyone knows!), allows customers to order online and pick their goods up in store, at a time and location of their convenience.
In Australasia, Click & Click is growing, for example Harvey Norman claim Click & Collect is over 50% of online, when The Warehouse launched Click & Collect 2 years ago, it went to 10% in the first week, and is now over 30% of online sales.
Click & Collect is growing due to:
- Consumers like it and expect it as an option.
- Ease of pickup from a store with parking and good opening hours.
- Enables immediate purchase and ease of finding key items, freeing up customer’s time when they visit the store.
- Home delivery often leads to “card to call” experiences with pick-up from a postal or courier location in less convenient locations.
- Companies beginning to put a stop to shopping deliveries at work.
- The majority of click & collect orders are picked up a few days after ordering, as the key part is the convenience of collection
- Enables short lead-time order to pickup, some retailers, like Country Road, offer 4-hour pickup.
More importantly, it drives significant benefits for retailers such as:
- Customers visit the store. Creating an opportunity to meet a known customer in store with cross-sell opportunities from their known orders.
- Reduces freight costs.
- Utilises existing stock in store (if picked from there).
- Engages the store teams into omnichannel – they see real customers using online and visiting their stores.
- Utilises store staff for picking orders – this is often costless as is done at off-peak times of the day in-store.
- Reduces packaging time and costs for online orders.
- Can be used as a pre-cursor for stores doing store fulfilment for online.
eStar has experience in implementing different models of Click & Collect. eStar’s base Click & Collect module simplifies and streamlines the Click & Collect process, making it easy to implement and reducing the risk for retailers using iSAMS to adopt this fulfilment model.
This includes the provision of “Collect In store” prompts on the front-end website, which allow the customer to choose a suitable location to collect their order from, as well as the ability to nominate a pickup person other than the customer.
In the back-end a new, dedicated UI for managing the receipt, notification and collection of Click & Collect orders, usable from all devices in any location, gives retailers flexibility around how they choose to deploy this process.
Click & Collect can be implemented in many ways. Like store fulfilment there is a tendency to make it overly-complex for fear of disappointing customers. However, the focus should be on implementing the improved experience for customers with a knowledgeable partner and managing exceptions.
Contact eStar now, if you would like to speak to the same people who have delivered Click & Collect for some of Australasia’s most successful brands.
Call our Australian team: 1800 503 891
Call our New Zealand team: 0800 151 655
Or email us with your questions sales@estaronline.com