In-Store Pickup Tips for Multi-Channel Retailers
With the holiday Christmas shopping officially underway, and many holiday shoppers using the internet to ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline) - offering ship-to-store services to online customers is a competitive advantage to multi-channel retailers.
Here are some tips to ensure a satisfying online and offline experience of your ship-to-store service for your customers:
On-Site Messaging and Usability
Because ship-to-store is a key customer service, it needs to be communicated well throughout your site (to remind customers you offer it, and to inform first-time visitors about it, regardless of which “landing page” attracts the visitor — it might not be your home page).
Wal-Mart does a great job at branding its “Site-To-Store” service throughout the site, and even uses a unique icon for it - including it in the navigation header, search and category results and product pages:
Navigation / Header
Category Pages
Product Pages
Estimated Arrival Date
Wal-Mart also uses an estimated arrival date for various shipping methods. It uses an absolute date which is better than “3-7 business days” which is not as clear to the customer (requires some mental gymnastics).
Wal-mart also leverages its meta description:
Other areas Wal-Mart could flaunt (like free shipping offers) its Site-to-Store service are email subject lines, pay-per-click ads and shopping engine data feed promo fields.
It’s also a good idea to have a functioning store-lookup tool from every product page, and a link to your ship-to-store policy. Don’t forget to explain which items are eligible for in-store pickup (e.g. perishable items or very heavy, oversized products). You may consider offering a policy that if it’s not there on time for any reason, customer receives a gift card (similar to Best Buy’s arrival date guarantee).
Ship to Store Customer Service Recommendations
- Make store shipping free
- Offer an express shipping offer for a premium
- Ask customer to indicate notification preference - email, telephone (even SMS)
- Send confirmation email post-purchase with store information - location, hours of operation, telephone number and even Google Map
- State how long you will hold merchandise for
- Send email when order is available for pick-up, or call customer if that’s an indicated preference
- Explain what the customer is required to present as identification/proof of purchase
- Make sure your pick-up station is always staffed and staff understand how to handle pick-up, returns and exchanges
- Offer a one-day-only incentive to buy more items than the pick-up order, e.g. 10% off
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I had an experience recently where I purchased an item online from Sears for pick up at my local store. The process went well other than the following issues:
- I never received an email order confirmation. Is this because it was an in store pick up? The site said I would get an order confirmation after checking out.
- They had a nice feature of allowing you to input your cell # to receive an SMS message when your order was ready. However, I never got a text message.
- Lastly, I don’t shop at Sears retail stores too often. So, I don’t know their hours off the top of my head. I placed my order around 9 or 10am. I got the family ready to go out and pick up my order… and get to Sears only to find that they don’t open until 11am. No biggie since I was there around 10:55am, but still, you would think that they could message in the store pick-up / availability copy the hours of the location you’re going to pick up from.
Linda- You saved it for last, but I think you hid a phenomenal point in there:
Offer a one-day-only incentive to buy more items than the pick-up order, e.g. 10% off
Previous purchasers are a critical demographic, especially when you are pulling the online consumer to a bricks-and-mortar location. AND–I love that you make it time-limited. What a great way to upsell!
In your article you focus on the ship-to-store sale. In my former job we cut out the send-part. Orders that where placed as a pick-up order where distributed to the store and handled there. The online store checked inventory before the order was placed, but in that way we where able to give the stores more sales (and thus avoiding channelconflicts) and we didn’t have to send products to the store which probably where already there. The store was responsible for customer communication. Any comment on that way of doing it? Its also worth mentioning that all the stores had more or less the exact same selection.
We run specials all the time where a customer can place an order and receive extra options of incentives for picking up in person or ordering by a selected date. Our niche is custom baseball pins. Usually orders of 500 pins or more will get a customer 3 free pin trading bags to carry and display at their little league tournaments and events.