Combine the Best of Both in Retail

This is one of my favorite ways to buy online and not have to wait for delivery.

From MarketingProfs.com:

Why Customers Might Want to Pick Up Online Orders at Your Store

Barnes & Noble pioneered the concept of online orders shipped to brick-and-mortar stores for customer pickup. In Marketing by the Numbers, Leland Harden and Bob Heyman present a case study on another successful "ship-to-store" program: Ace Hardware's.

"When a customer selects ship-to-store service," they explain, "orders are fulfilled out of the warehouse for shipping to the local Ace—at no charge."

According to Ace eCommerce Marketing Supervisor, Mark Lowe, ship-to-store is a wildly popular option: online shoppers choose in-store pickups 73 percent of the time. It's not hard to see why:

• The absence of shipping charges means substantial savings on larger items like grills and table saws, and thus lowers barrier of entry to high-priced purchases.
• With once- or twice-weekly shipments from the warehouse, delivery times can rival those of UPS shipments sent straight to a customer's house.

Stores, meanwhile, appreciate that 33 percent of customers who pick up an online purchase also buy other items during their visits.

But before you spring a similar program on your brick-and-mortar locations, make sure they're ready: "Retailers have a lot going on in their stores every day, and this is just an additional responsibility that you're asking them to handle," says Lowe. "So [make] it as easy as possible for them to receive those orders, give it to the customer during pickup, and then, if necessary, take that return. I think it's really important that if you allow ship to store, you also allow them to return the product to the store."

The Po!nt: Customers like ship-to-store options—and a substantial number might just buy something else while they're taking delivery.

Source: Marketing by the Numbers.

Sphere: Related Content