| I don't think most people realize how hard online-to-local-pickup is for a retailer. "Interested in local pickup? Give us a call." is going to be a better customer experience 9 times out of 10. I hope Square gets it. Retailers - many of them with limited resources and technical skills - face big technical, UI, and logistical issues. I'll give one implementation example that shows all three; this applies to all retailers who don't stock everything in the store OR have multiple locations. The retailer must essentially keep availability counts for items that can be sold online (if different), then a separate list per store. These lists must be accurate or you're going to have angry customers showing up to grab items you don't have - and anyone who has done retail knows how hard accurate inventory can be, especially with entry-level staff. Once inventory is accurate, these retailers must then program their sites to show which items are available for pickup at which locations. THEN if you want to allow customers to pick up items that aren't in the store, you need to communicate when they can pick it up based on delivery time. It gets complicated: do you have the customer choose their closest store up front, even if they don't want to do local pickup? This implementation wastes online buyers' time and creates a barrier to browsing. Do you have customers choose the store when they check out? If so, the option might not be available for the items they've chosen thereby frustrating your customer. Do they choose the store on the product page? The product page is usually your busiest page already, and you generally don't want to add any steps between it and checkout. Regardless of which option you choose, you then have to figure out how to deal with available at nearby locations. Do you really want your user selecting all 3 nearby locations to check availability for pickup? Do you want to display every nearby store that could fulfill pickup? How do you give them the message that it's available nearby? Should you share the negative when it's not available nearby either to prevent them from checking each store? The questions just go on. It's not impossible, but there's a lot that could go wrong here for two or three-store retailer. Even Target got it wrong when I recently tried to buy a wedding gift. They wanted me to wait 2 days for them to deliver a vacuum to the store, even though they had half a dozen in stock when I called. |
My wife and I were researching minivans in our metro area. We got calls from the dealership asking if we're still interested in the vehicle. We said 'yes'. One hour before we drove to the 'burbs' to check it out, I called to confirm the availability of said vehicle. They said 'yes, it's still here.' We get to the dealership only to find out that the vehicle was sold THE DAY BEFORE. A major car dealership didn't have a system in place to know their inventory at any given point in time. They're a part of a weird "sharing" system between dealerships that can borrow/trade/steal vehicles from their partner dealerships-- all within the same "family" company. But they clearly had no way to track this activity.
It seems that inventory control/management spans many domains. Needless to say, they lost our business and we bought from someone else.