Some of the nation’s top retailers, seeking to make it as easy as possible for shoppers to spend money with them this Christmas season, have begun promoting sameday, in-store pickup for items bought on their websites.
The move is aimed, in part, at guaranteeing shoppers that they can find what they’re looking for at an acceptable price and have it now rather than later.
“You don’t have to hope it’s there. You choose the time and date you go to get it,” said Don Delzell, co-chief executive officer with e-commerce firm Future Merchants Inc., with offices in Los Angeles and New York.
And, he adds, in-store pickup is faster than having items shipped. Instant gratification.
Best Buy Co. Inc. of Richfield, Minn., the largest U.S. electronics retailer, aims to have orders ready for pickup within 45 minutes and says it will ship out-of-stock products for free.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville, the world’s largest retailer, says it will leverage its scale to expand its “Pick Up Today” program to nearly 800 stores in large metropolitan areas after a successful launch at 34 stores in the Salt Lake City region. Orders are typically ready in about four hours, the company says.
“Pick Up Today is a project that deals with immediacy,” Bill Simon, president and chief executive officer of Wal-Mart U.S. operations, told retail analysts at an annual conference in Northwest Arkansas earlier this month. “If we leverage our store base, we can provide immediacy that online-only players can’t get anywhere near.”
The Salt Lake City stores were showing average online order size 22 percent higher than the average walmart.com order, he said. The company intends to have the expanded program in place for Christmas in most of the target markets.
Wal-Mart also is expanding its agreement with FedEx Corp. to ship online orders to locations in New York, Washington and Chicago after launching that project in Los Angeles and Boston.
“A lot of people, increasingly, the younger generations, want it now. Immediacy is a barrier that’s easy to overcome with 8,000 points of distribution,” Simon told the analysts.
Patricia Edwards, retail analyst with Trutina Financial in Bellevue, Wash., said the move by Wal-Mart and other retailers is mostly a convenience for shoppers.
“All you have to do is run in and pick it up and you’re done,” she said.
Although convenient pickup could cut into shoppers’ impulse buys, she said, “anything that gets the consumer into the store one more time is a benefit.”
Toys R Us Inc. said this month it intends to have more than 7,500 items available for the Christmas shopping season that can be bought online and picked up at 260 Babies R Us stores and select Toys R Us stores in major metropolitan areas. It guarantees the products will be available in two hours.
The company says it intends to expand the service to all Toys R Us stores by the middle of next year.
Sears Holding Co., parent company of Sears and Kmart, says in-stock items can be picked up the same day or the next day.
The company says an email confirming the order is usually sent within two hours and a second e-mail notifies the customer that the order is ready.
Shopper surveys done by BIGresearch of Worthington, Ohio, for the National Retail Federation found that online shoppers intend to spend nearly $860 on Christmas this year, including purchases for themselves. That amount is nearly 25 percent higher than the average for all adults in the survey.
“Underlying behavior is that consumers who shop online and then pick up in-store have a significantly higher average market basket,” Delzell said.
One advantage of in-store pickup, he said, is that the retailer gets credit in the mind of the shopper for the shipping cost, when often the item being purchased is in the store already or is on an inbound delivery.
“And then you’ve got them there,” he said.
BIGresearch found that 63.8 percent of online retailers anticipate sales to grow by 15 percent or more from a year ago.
EMarketer Inc., a New Yorkbased firm that tracks digital commerce, projects fourthquarter e-commerce sales to rise 13.7 percent over a year ago to $51.4 billion.
Business, Pages 75 on 10/31/2010