Click & Collect refined through lockers
The retailers who are set to thrive in the future will be the ones who are best able to refine their supply chain and reduce internal costs without impacting convenience or service to customers, says Jon Walkington, vice president of real-time retail at Apex Supply Chain Technologies.
A subset of this pool, the ultimate winners, will be retailers who increase convenience to customers while reducing internal costs.
In an age where many customers prefer to shop online whether from home, the office, whilst commuting or wherever else they find a 4G mobile connection, having a competitive retail offering is expanding beyond price and an easy to navigate website, to include stock availability and delivery times too.
Click & Collect continues to soar in popularity because it gives customers convenient options. This is critical for bricks and mortar retailers with customers who are unable to wait for home delivery. Or perhaps unwilling to pay for shipping, but still want their purchase as soon as possible.
Click & Collect benefits retailers too. If the desired product is already in-stock at a store, the cost of fulfilment to the customer is significantly reduced. Even if a product is not available at store level, shipping on-line orders in bulk from a distribution centre to a store is still cheaper than making individual home deliveries.
However, there is a catch to offering Click & Collect, the customer expects a smooth experience when they get to the store, to complement their “one click” purchase. They do not want to wait. Yet recent studies suggest about a third of customers are made to wait, for up to 20 minutes, for a variety of reasons. This almost defeats the point of offering Click & Collect.
At Apex we are familiar with the issues experienced when implementing a Click & Collect program. They are typically “supply chain” issues, lost parcels, long queues, lack of staff to assist, all symptoms of a faltering supply chain which in-store, Click & Collect lockers are set to solve.
It is similar to how our technologies streamline the hand-off of goods and services in industry to compliment “lean engineering” processes. Apex lockers reduce the number of touchpoints and inefficiencies in the Click & Collect supply chain whilst providing an unsurpassed level of convenience for customers.
More and more retailers will begin to offer Click & Collect. But only a smaller subset will be able to do this in a way that benefits their supply chain as much as their customers.
