In a physical store, you select your goods, pay for them, and take them home immediately afterwards. This is never the case for online shopping though. There is always a delay between the time you pay for your goods and when you receive them. And it’s not just a time delay. It involves extra costs for shipping and handling. This delay is not ideal considering half of shoppers abandon their carts in the last stage due to excessively high additional costs. Another 19% abandon their carts when they see delivery is going to take ages.

Let’s take the example of Jonah who is planning to go camping tomorrow but while packing realizes that his neighbor borrowed his tent stakes a few months back and then moved house before returning them.

Needing to replace them as soon as possible, he goes online but nobody offers same day delivery. There are expedited one-day-shipping options but Jonah wants to leave the very next morning and has no guarantees that the delivery guy will arrive before 9 am.

Besides, he feels that paying $8 to ship a 10-dollar pack of tent stakes is insane. If you have a physical store, a case like this one provides you with a massive edge over your purely online-based competitors. 

By offering store pickup you can:

1. Offer Jonah same-day pickup.
2. Reduce his shipping costs to zero.

Store pickup is a great way to motivate price conscious customers and those in a hurry to make a purchase that they wouldn’t have made otherwise. Drawing customers into your store also presents you with the opportunity to sell them more stuff.

How to properly implement store pickup

• Offer it in the shipping selector since most customers see it as an alternative to home delivery. Presenting it on other parts of the cart or product pages would most likely result in it being overlooked.
• If you ship to a store instead of having the product available there make sure you clearly indicate that and the date when customers can collect the product since people expect items to be available immediately when store pickup is involved.
• Offer pickup at a store closest to the customer by either using GPS (for mobile users) or the default address. Don’t just have customers select an option from a list of stores. Let them enter their address or use their GPS coordinates to show them the store closest to them. You should also display the distance to the store, opening hours, and link to a map.
• Allow shoppers to switch stores for convenience. A customer who lives in the suburbs but commutes to the city for work will probably want to pick up his goods at a store closer to his home.
• Don’t select store pick-up by default even if it is free since home delivery is the most convenient option.

Examples

B&H

JCPenney

Sears

Walmart