Online shopping is growing in popularity. With online retailers popping up in record numbers, consumers are drawn into the online retail space. Whether you have an existing business with an online presence or are considering starting a new company, understanding what is click and collect should be a priority.
What is Click and Collect in Retail?
Click and collect is a common practice for most retailers nowadays, and a winning one.
Following the birth and growth of e-commerce, traditional retailers had to adapt their businesses. Most big retail chains did the obvious:
Bring their products online.
By developing an online presence, businesses now are tasked with finding the right shipping methods.
Almost every major retailer nowadays has its own e-commerce platform.
With increasing weight on their online sales and consequent decrease of their physical sales, businesses needed to face the fact that most customers expect low or non-existent shipping fees a new service was born: Click andCollect.
The concept is quite simple: customers will buy their items online, but instead of having them shipped to their house, and paying delivery fees, they can choose to pick the item in the store instead.
Due to the need for contactless interactions and lockdown, Click and Collect systems saw a surge in demand.
Now that you can answer the questions: what is Click and Collect in Retail, let’s go over the main advantages and disadvantages.
The Advantages
This creates obvious benefits for both customers and retailers, which have led to the fast and wide adoption of this practice. Customers are expected to spend $95.9 billion on Click and Collect in 2022 alone.
For the Customer:
- Avoids delivery fees
- Get the items faster since the product is usually already on-premises
- Allows to physically check products and simplifies the return process
- A delivery alternative, for those who can’t have their items shipped to their home or workplace
For the Retailer:
- Avoids spending on delivery fees (free shipping scenarios)
- Bypasses the logistic work involved in shipping items
- Increases of the foot traffic on your store
- Improve of the upselling opportunities from online buyers
And it’s no wonder that retailers are embracing this trend as up to 37% of the online customers end up buying an extra, unplanned item when picking up their previously bought item.
The Disadvantages
Although there’s many benefits to the Click and Collect system, there’s also some concerns.
If the shop saves money by not shipping the items, they might spend it in staff work hours. When the volume of Click and Collect becomes quite large, it is often needed to have one or more staff members taking care of it full-time. Alot of retailers even made a dedicated desk or space for this service. In addition, managing this system might also come with a cost since the average retailer spends up to 45 hours a month doing so.
With this in mind, a new trend is surging through the use of smart lockers.
Inspired by the parcel delivery locker system, a new use-case for smart lockers was born, aiming to fix the Click and Collect issues.
The Next Step: Automating Click and Collect
This is what is starting to be called Click and Collect.
The concept is quite simple: the user does the Click and Collect process, but instead of interacting with a staff member to collect its item, the store will have a smart locker, inside its premises, and the user will pick the item up from there.
Obviously, this system also brings some advantages to the retailer since it significantly reduces the amount of staff work needed to run the Click and Collect system. Instead of having staff members ready to deliver items at all times, they simply need to deposit the item in the locker and users will be able to pick them autonomously.
In practice, the retailer is automating the Click and Collect process by cutting most of the human cost out of it.
An example of a Click and Collect Smart Locker by Bloq.it
And taking into account that customers look for a simple and quick process when they choose this delivery method, it is also important to ensure that the user doesn’t have to wait in line or that he doesn’t have a bad experience. Having a uniform process allows businesses to easily control quality.
Click and Collect systems also can be fully contactless experiences without any human interaction, making them a good lockdown solution.
Therefore, it’s most important to ensure that the user has a good experience when interacting with this system.
That’s our biggest focus when developing our software and that’s why retailers looking to automate their Click and Collect system. To optimize your online retail experience or to further understand what is Click and Collect, your business should take a look at our Bloq.it OS, which provides an intuitive, easy-to-use, and simple user interface.