A best-practice guide to click and collect

For UK retailers operating both online and in “bricks-and-mortar”, the option of “click and collect”—offering customers the ability to purchase or reserve a product online and collect in-store—is rapidly becoming more important. It’s not a new proposition, and Argos led the way 10 years ago, with many smaller retailers also adopting a Heath Robinson approach to present cross-channel options early on.

In the UK, click and collect (C&C) has grown over the last 10 years and Argos’s own C&C sales have grown at 60 percent per year, now representing 70 percent of online sales. Other retailers such as John Lewis are also seeing very high growth figures from C&C with an increasing proportion of online sales, and yet more retailers are continuing to join the party with Plumb Center and Game.co.uk introducing C&C in the last few months.

The growth over the last few years clearly proves that the click and collect model is attractive to British consumers, and as the expectation for retailers to offer this service, and to do it well, increases, it is easy to see why in 2011 this is becoming a prioritised consideration.

Best practice customer experience
The online journey for using click and collect has evolved and become much slicker since the early days as the service has matured and systems provide more integration. Below are some suggestions for best practice customer experience taken from UK retailers’ websites. Later, we will compare this with European and US sites.

1. Promote the service and integrate it
As C&C now represents a high proportion of online sales for many retailers, it’s important to reflect this with an integrated proposition for delivery and collection options, yet also providing a guide at the store entry point for those customers that have not shopped using this method.

PC World (below) ensures that customers are aware of the Collect@Store service by promoting it on the homepage and linking to a set of steps explaining how to use it.

Clear iconography representing the different options for delivery and collection throughout the shopping journey is also important and presents C&C as an equal alternative to home delivery.



   

The examples above from various sites clearly position the C&C service as a mature fulfilment option alongside home delivery.

2. Allow for early sight of stock/store availability
Whether the site functionality offers the ability to check stock in local stores or simply to see which stores participate in the C&C service, it is helpful to the shopper to present this at an early stage in the shopping journey rather than only in the basket or checkout.

Argos presents a postcode entry on the product page that then loads a modal window displaying the nearest store as well as the stock availability (below).

 

The information is clearly displayed and allows you to check stock in other stores and enter a new postcode. Additionally, with the modal window, the store availability is displayed without moving the shopper away from the crucial buying page--more about this later.

B&Q has also enabled the stock availability check at an early stage and does it one step earlier on the list page.

Early sight of the stock availability is particularly attractive for the shopper who is looking to solely use C&C as his delivery method--he can see up-front whether an item is available to collect in-store without needing to enter the buying process to find out.

3. Present the option to select a default collection store
Allowing customers to enter a postcode, select a store and check stock before they add to the basket is great, but if this store selection is not remembered throughout the checkout when the decision is made to purchase, it’s frustrating to then go through the same process of selecting a store again.

B&Q offers the option to make a store your default selection when reviewing stock levels across stores. This is then carried through the checkout process but also gives you the option to select another store at each stage.

Selecting one of the stores then presents the store address, map and opening hours before closing the window to continue shopping. Not only does the shopper’s store selection get carried through the checkout, but it also changes the stock displays on the list page against each item to show stock availability in that particular store. This is also shown on the product detail page, and if the item is out of stock in the selected store, it suggests the nearest store where stock is available. Further still, if multiple items have been added to basket where stock availability varies in the selected store, the shopper can cross-check other stores for the highest availability across all items.

4. Order the stores available for collection intuitively
When selecting a store for an initial stock check or to select for collection, most sites display their list of stores arranged by relative distance from the postcode entered. This of course makes sense, but it’s worth considering the shopper’s motivations for choosing C&C and distance isn’t the only consideration.

Jessops displays its list of stores ordered by availability for collection, with the quickest available presented first. There may be other stores closer, but lower down the list as they don’t have stock as immediately as others, although the distance to individual stores is still displayed.

This is great as it addresses a key motivation for using C&C: quick pick-up. Other considerations may be the amount of stock available (if multiple quantities are required) or the hours of opening (if, for example, the shopper wishes to collect on the way home from the office), so it would be ideal to present “sort by” options in the store list.

5. Keep the C&C journey integrated with the buying process
The C&C journey introduces a lot of additional information into the traditional online shopping process—not least stock availability, store selection, and store details—the challenge is to present this intuitively and without exiting the sales funnel.

Using the above example from Jessops, the stock availability for a product in different stores is displayed in a modal window, and when the store info is selected, this is also displayed in a second modal, which means that a lot of information can be presented to the shopper without them moving from the page.

It is only when clicking on the Map & directions button that the shopper is directed to the main store page, but in a separate browser window/tab so the shopping journey is not interrupted but the store information can be kept open for printing, for example.

Lessons from Europe and US
So far, the best practice suggestions have been taken from UK sites, but it also helps to look to examples from the rest of Europe and also the US for a comparison. In many ways, an increased density of stores allows for greater C&C demand, leading to a more evolved online user journey, and this can be seen in a couple of examples below.

Europe: Vanden Borre

The Belgian electricals retailer, Vanden Borre has a very intuitive C&C user journey, with many of the elements mentioned above. It also goes a step further with some options in the basket that I haven’t seen in many UK sites.

The basket shows the stock availability per item for both home delivery and store collection.

As well as the multichannel stock availability, the basket also allows separate delivery options per line item, so that not only could one item be collected in-store and another delivered, but also separate items could be collected in separate stores.

Moving from the basket to the checkout, this site allows for online payment, not just reservation for collection in-store, which makes sense if an order could have multiple fulfilment options.

US: Walmart
Click and collect, as a label, can represent two different models: reserve online and pay and collect in-store, usually on the same day, or pay online and have delivered to store for collection, usually within two to three days. Online stores in the UK use either of these models, with the latter being relatively easier for the retailer in terms of data integration.

In the US, Walmart offers both of these models, promoting both its “pick up today” and “site to store” delivery options.

Offering both options brings both the convenience of quick collection for widely stocked items, plus a much greater range beyond what stores can keep in stock. Availability for both of these delivery options are displayed throughout the shopping journey from the product list page, and are included as facets in the filtered navigation.

Conclusion
Of course, the success of C&C for a retailer is not just based on a good online user journey, but is dependent on product types, customer proposition and also the experience for the customer at the collection end as well as the reservation. I didn’t find C&C on Tesco Direct (http://direct.tesco.com) particularly user friendly as an online experience, but it is evidently seeing success, recently doubling the participating stores to 600 and launching “click and drive-through” collection points.

We must also remember that front-end usability is just the tip of the iceberg in enhancing the C&C service, and improvements may require a lot of work to integrate the various retail systems and processes, for example, stock accuracy.

Additionally, in comparison with online stores in other countries, we should note that culture also plays a part in the usability of the site. Home delivery is not so popular in France, and both Intermarche and Leclerc request a postcode before the shopping experience begins.

However, as with traditional online ordering, the online shopping journey for C&C can only benefit from clearly thought through layouts and design so that trust is created and minimum thought required from the shopper. Ecommerce has been seen as a leveller between the large high-street retailers and smaller pure-play etailers, however as C&C grows and improves as a service, this can become a differentiating service proposition and therefore a competitive advantage for the larger players with networks of stores.

Ben Popplestone is a director at Paul Lewis Design, a specialist ecommerce design agency.