For UK retailers operating both online and in ‘bricks and mortar’, the option of Click & 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.

Click & Collect has grown over the last 10 years and Argos’s own C&C sales have grown at 60% per year, now representing 70% 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 Click & Collect model is serving customers well, 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.

1. Promote the Service and Integrate it in

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 ensures that customers are aware of their Collect@Store service by promoting it on the home page 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.

These examples from various sites clearly position the C&C service as a mature fulfillment 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.

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 their delivery method – they can see upfront 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 their 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 – stock availability, store selection, store details etc – and 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 info can be kept open for printing etc.

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 retailer, Vanden Borre has a very intuitive C&C user journey, with many of the elements mentioned above. They also go 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 multi-channel 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 fulfillment 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 2-3 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 their ‘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 particularly user friendly as an online experience, but they are 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 leveler 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.

So what are the keys to exploiting the opportunity of increasing online sales and surviving the economic downturn? I think there are three areas to focus on this year:

1. Do the basics well
2. Use rich media
3. Engage customers

Doing the basics well

I’ve been around ecommerce for over 10 years, and a lot has changed since the early days (technology, legislation, best practice). But the basics are still the same, and the number 1 rule is ‘put business before technology’. The focus is on generating business and this can be determined using 3 measures:

·      Number of visitors (get prospects to your website)
·      Rate of conversion (turn them into customers by convincing them to place an order)
·      Average order value (make sure they order as much as possible)

This makes sense of course – it’s the sales funnel for the site. Reporting on these will tell you just how successful your site is and focusing efforts on improving them will make your site more efficient.

Using rich media

High street retailers have been enhancing store atmospherics for years (think M&S over the last decade) and online retailers are now picking up on delivering a rich customer experience on the website. You have probably seen restaurant sites with 360 degree visual tours, fashion sites with product image zoom and beginning to see more sites that allow the user to customise the pages. These trends are set to continue and a recent survey by Internet Retailing shows that over 90% of online retailers intend to add rich media and social networking functions this year.

Engaging customers

Of course, generating new business is essential for growth, but repeat sales are fundamental for capitalising on that momentum, and efforts for acquiring new customers should be anchored by encouraging them to return to the site and order again. The customer experience doesn’t end at the checkout – the delivery and post-sales service is crucial to the retailer’s value proposition. Building community is also becoming much more recognised and giving customers the opportunity to provide reviews, recommend a product to a friend, and ‘bookmark’ pages to a social networking site are features that are gaining popularity on online stores. Social networks are also becoming important to businesses for interacting with prospects and customers, and getting the word out. I also expect online video to play a bigger part this year in ecommerce marketing plans.

Case study: Standanddeliver.com

I was recently working with a site that does a lot of these things really well. Stand & Deliver are a leading supplier of TV, Hi-fi and speaker stands, based in the UK, and have been growing rapidly since starting up 4 years ago.

Here are some of the things I think have been part of their site’s recipe for success:

• One product per page - improves SEO rankings and delivers visitors straight to the product they have searched for
• Very clear section layout on home page (by type and by manufacturer) – easy navigation takes visitors quickly to the product they are looking for from the home page
• Lots of info on product pages (technical data, various images, alternative products) – visitors are more likely to buy if the information they need is clear and accessible
• Security verifications on checkout pages – increases peace of mind and likelihood of conversion
• Clear FAQ (ordering, security delivery, returns etc) – setting out the service proposition manages customers expectations from the beginning, gives peace of mind and, again, increases conversion
• Ordering info also available on product page – particularly useful if this is the landing page for the visitor
• Scroll-over image-zoom widget on product page – rich media to enhance the shopping experience and bring visitors closer to the product
• Social network bookmarking on home page – engages visitors and invites them to discuss the site within their networks
• User generated product reviews (Reevoo) – once again, engages customers and offers visitors authentic customer feedback for the products being viewed (Tesco Direct have also just signed a deal with Reevoo)
  

Recent feedback from retailers using Actinic software for their online shop shows similar trends in the focus for 2009.

If you run an online store or have responsibility for the ecommerce operations for a high street retailer, what are your big plans for 2009?