The agony of choice: Where should the items be picked up?
Pickup at the Ernsting’s family store was easy and quick. The customer presented her order number, the sales associate picked up a folder, located the page with the current orders based on the barcode and retrieved the package after a brief search and handed it to the customer.
With an increasing number of orders arriving at the store, the processes and store associates have to be well prepared for the order pickups. Experts unanimously recommend to set up an especially marked location for in-store pickup. However, they don’t all agree as to where at the store this area should be located. Some suggest a central location – as shown by how C&A solves this issue in its city center store in Bonn – right next to the main checkout. The Bell and Howell study supports this option and indicates that interviewed customers prefer an order pickup location at the front of the store.
Meanwhile, other experts believe a location in specialty departments makes more sense. While a central location definitely adds to a quick locating process, the theme-related reference is primarily intended to boost additional sales. In a white paper titled “Click & Collect: Multichannel entry with pitfalls”, Martin Himmel, Managing Director of ecom consulting GmbH, maintains that an online shoe order should not be picked up in the housewares department for example. After all, if the customer doesn’t like the shoes, he could simply try on a different pair of shoes at the shoe department and also choose matching socks and care products to go along with his purchase.
Space and time prerequisites to facilitate this service have to be an essential part of creating an omnichannel concept. While a small cupboard behind the cash register might work for some retailers, major stores like C&A in Düsseldorf require an extra space. In this case, orders are arranged in alphabetical order by customer name. Given the approximately 50 orders per day, this means a lot of extra time and effort. What’s more, customers can order up to 50 clothing items at once and leave them at the store for up to 14 days before they have to pick up the merchandise. Orders that have not been collected are returned to the head office. At Ernsting’s family, orders are opened after five days and sold at the store.
Having said that, one thing is certain when it comes to the location: it is essential to clearly mark the pickup location. Does that seem logical? It does, yet according to JDA, customers were unable to find designated locations at stores in ten percent of all cases.