There’s a lot that can go wrong from initial order placed to in-store pick-up. Every retailer is unique and so to are the BOPIS issues. Overall, the biggest issue with BOPIS seems to be a lack of clarity/priority for order pick-ups. Having a dedicated BOPIS order pick-up counter is great – not so much if there’s no staff to serve customers who show up to get their order. Retailers need to think about adding dedicated staff resources to adequately process and serve BOPIS customers – not just lump more duties on existing store teams.

In the first place, there is a dramatic difference between a retailer launching BOPIS capability simply because it’s the flavor of the month, and a retailer preparing the environment, the associates, the supply chain, and having the inventory accuracy to actually pull off BOPIS successfully. There are the components of a successful BOPIS offering. Reserved car spaces may out on the outer fringe of customer service, but these others are critical.

Retailers will end up walking away from BOPIS, or at least BOPIS where you don’t have to come into the store. It’s never been clear that you actually make any money offering this and if the experiences are dissatisfying, maybe the idea is to avoid it altogether. It’s not like shoppers are demanding this.

There has certainly been a lot of growing pains as it relates to BOPIS. Most retailers have figured out to move the pick up from the back of the store to the front (duh) and retailers like Walmart seem to be making a ton of progress automating the process with their towers. Of course, as a retailer, there’s a fine line between making BOPIS totally seamless and using the opportunity of having the customer in-store for cross-sell/upsell. On the seamless front, geofencing so personnel can know when customer in the vicinity can help speed the process.

The vast opportunities inherent in BOPIS transactions are matched only by the vast challenges inherent in BOPIS transactions. Store operations, marketing, logistics, merchandising, and inventory must all be aligned for a seamless BOPIS transaction. Is it any wonder that the industry is struggling to get everything right every time? The good news is most retailers are investing in the necessary process and technology changes to make BOPIS successful. The better news is that technology will continue to help.

The real winning proposition for BOPIS is to attract your customers to your retail locations. However, fundamentally, retailers are struggling with the operational side of making BOPIS work. While it’s all about efficiencies, and getting your customer to come to the store, it’s imperative to have a clear and transparent process in place to help avoid friction and confusion.

Additionally, in the right retail environments, the true magic of BOPIS will come to life when customers engage with educated and empowered sales associates. Those associates will have the tools and solutions in place to know these customers, and drive them to buy incremental products, more full price items and at higher margins.

BOPIS is a long-term investment as there is a culture change associated with it. It’s more of a marathon than a sprint.

For some retailers BOPIS sounds like a good idea on paper, but it falls apart at store level. Retailers need to add services to stay competitive, but it’s crazy to ask associates to pick and package BOPIS orders when the sales floor is busy and already understaffed. There should be BOPIS-trained associates who pick the correct items, and a dedicated area with quick checkout that’s convenient for the customer, not the retailer.

Space is an issue. Do you take valuable sales space off of the floor or hide it at the back of the store in an out of the way – and inconvenient – place? Do you make BOPIS customers stand in the regular checkout queue or allow them to jump the line? Either way you risk alienating shoppers.

Adding BOPIS can’t be a me-too decision; there are too many things that can disrupt the store and shopper satisfaction to be considered.

Here is the question for the retailers: what are you thinking?
“BOPIS, that is great, we can make the customer come into the store and maybe buy some more stuff.” or “BOPIS, we can make it easy for the customer to pick up their stuff and never get out of their car. They will end up buying more regularly from us.”

Like everything else in retail, it has to be about the customer. BOPIS is all about convenience.

Instead of thinking of technology as the silver bullet, or focusing on a set of tactical actions, let me turn the tables and look at the organization. We have witnessed many changes in the past few years in retail and CPG in technology, competitive landscape, and the shopper behavior. The consumer is looking for convenience, value, and gratification on their own terms in every interaction they have with the store and brand. On the other side, the structural changes to a retail organization have been slow to respond to the external market demands. The organizational silos and pyramids flourish like never before, yet their influence on the customer cut across boundaries and does the flow of data. The next decade will see the complete recast of the traditional merchants, buyers, marketers, operations, finance, and supply chain fiefdoms and instead be focused on horizontal processes that create higher value and respond with greater agility and speed. In the main, what we have today is the layering of new processes on top of or in parallel with… Read more »

While shopper expectations continue to drive BOPIS (click-and-collect, and I would include QSR drive-thru) initiatives, I would remind retailers of the tremendous value of those shoppers that actually cross your threshold and actually visit your store to shop. It seems that these initiatives, while designed to enhance the shopping experience, often penalize the shoppers that are actually in your store! Those shoppers and customers are often asked to wait while drive-thru and BOPIS are served first. It seems to me that those people that walk into your store should be rewarded for their welcome presence.

In-store execution and inventory accuracy are two of the biggest pain points for BOPIS. Retailers have made a lot of progress in training staff on fulfilling BOPIS orders and the larger chains have designated areas and staff for managing BOPIS orders. However, in most cases, it is far from convenient or frictionless. Smaller stores have even greater challenges as limited staffs must manage BOPIS on top of everything else they do – like service in-store shoppers. The other big issue is accurate real-time inventory. Many retailers don’t have true, real-time inventory and they must use safety stock calculations for BOPIS orders. Therefore, they turn away online shoppers when they actually have one or more items in the store, but can’t promise it to the customer. Safety stock is an expensive problem! Some key technologies that will help improve the effectiveness of BOPIS are unified commerce platforms (enable real-time enterprise inventory visibility), cloud based POS and a network that harmonizes the enterprise. Another big problem as mentioned in the article above is pick-up. New technologies are… Read more »

Initial BOPIS efforts were done to make things easier for the retailer and were almost done begrudgingly. For example, many Walmarts had the in-store pickup located at the back of the store with customer service and their backroom. This meant shoppers had to not only come into the store, but also trudge all the way through the store. Fast forward to today with dedicated lanes and pick up points. Focusing on ease and convenience will be key to make BOPIS work. Integrating with voice and mobile apps will help make this easier.

The past six months I have made a mission of standing and watching, from inside the store the BOPUIS customer experience. The retailers I experienced have more thinking to do. Many times it seemed that customers had to stand in line and at times, wait over five minutes. Agitation was on their face. There was never enough staff evident. Makes me wonder how the expectation of customer service and add-on sales, which is viewed as a service to the customer, can possibly occur. Seems like I saw a lot of customers who were now NOT going to walk into the store.

BOPIS only makes things more efficient when there are enough, well-trained employees on hand to handle the extra workload. All too often I see retailers trying to dip their toes in with BOPIS and then busy customers end up in the above “waiting an extra 10+ minutes” scenario.

BOPIS failures can be avoided by keeping track of BOPIS orders and staffing accordingly, as well as taking the time to train employees on how to handle common issues (like parking and wait times). Of course, this all starts with retailers communicating openly with their employees about the successes/challenges of the program as it scales.

BOPIS, or as we call it “Click and Collect,” has been in Europe longer than in the US, but that is not to say that retailers are any better at it or customer satisfaction is any higher. There have been so many bad stories as retailers have struggled to get to grips with it. Waitrose had so many click and collect deliveries for John Lewis customers that they had difficulty running the back shop of their food stores. Poor delivery of the right items, items not ready when customers arrive, the list goes on. Two things need to change to make this really work well. First, retailers need to staff appropriately for the volume of collections that are taking place, to expect stores to absorb this additional workload is unrealistic. Second, the solutions retailers are running need to coordinate so much better, what time will the order be ready, what time will the customer be expected it is all about communication so that retailer and customer do not get surprises. Interestingly, online order delivery to… Read more »

One way to think about BOPIS differently is in terms of the store as a point of customer interaction and experience, inclusive of many elements that include the buy online/pickup in store ability. The problem I think most retailers implementing this model will have is bolting it onto a legacy environment – legacy process, legacy tech, legacy mindset, etc. – and the outcomes will not be as strong as hoped for as consumer adoption starts to scale (“most BOPIS solutions are not ready to scale to 40 percent of transactions as predicted for coming years”).

It’s hard to step back and view the store as a multi-use interaction point versus a fulfillment center but there is so much more to winning retail today that needs consideration IMO.

So many retailers are tripping over their own feet to make BOPIS work. It’s still just growing pains. The main pain point for BOPIS customers is the lack of reliability, standardization, and adoption across the retail industry. Once customers see it working, the more it will be ingrained as another option for purchasing and fulfillment. Just like any initiative, retailers need to invest in the back end and infrastructure to make it work. The tech component will not matter as much as the people and process components will.

The technology around BOPIS continues to evolve, specifically around optimizing the store associates’ timely and efficient picking of a customer’s orders. Opportunities still exist for retailers to capitalize on add-on sales opportunities through personalized messaging throughout the picking and pickup process. The “friction” within BOPIS pickups still exists with directing the customer to a specified location in the store and enabling the verification and signature for the goods quickly. Retailers need to continue to focus on reducing the amount of time it takes to locate and pick up a customer’s order, which is a marriage of mobile technology and process engineering.