The Click and Collect market segment is now worth $3.7B year currently and worth almost $1.6B in the final quarter of the year alone. For a convenience store retailer this market represents a huge opportunity. Gone are the days when you categorized customers into ‘Store only’ or ‘Online Only’. Today’s customers want an Omnichannel experience and if your store is not onboard this new phenomenon, you are bound to be left behind.
‘Click and Collect’ you say?
For the uninitiated, Waitrose was the first supermarket in the UK to launch a series of automated, temperature-controlled lockers in third party locations. Orders are stored in ambient, chilled and frozen lockers and can be refilled several times a day. Customers can place orders through waitrose.com/lockers on their computer or tablet and will be sent a text message with a PIN number. Customers can then drive up to the Click and Collect lockers, enter the PIN and collect their shopping. As simple as that.
In the current scenario, customers are losing confidence in their online orders reaching them on time, especially during Christmas, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Imagine having to explain your 5 year old the concept of delayed delivery due to excessive online orders. The other downside from a retailer POV is the ever increasing cost in real estate, which makes setting up a full-fledged store in every locality of the city, a distant dream. With the Click and collect model as an extension to your current set up, your store can ensure the customer gets their preferred size of cold turkey, with all the trimmings, just before Christmas. And all that without having to stand in a line. Imagine the loyalty this could drive!
To quantify the size of this market opportunity that Waitrose is tapping: $80M of their $930M sales last year was through the ‘Click and Collect’ model. Other major retailers like Amazon, Tesco, Sainsbury, Coles and Boots have seen this trend evolve and have a substantial investment in this setup. The only problem this model is now throwing up, is the limited no. of slots available for pick up. The customers can’t seem to get enough of this ‘fad’. And why wouldn’t they. If you got a guarantee that you would have your order delivered and can pick it up on the way back from work, at a convenient location like a subway stop for example, you are bound to adapt and adopt.
So how do the big guns make this happen? They probably have scores of people working the wires in the background to make the logistics of a ‘click and collect’ model work, right? Wrong. All you need is a strong partner in analytics to help you adapt to this market trend. Manthan offers you solutions that can see you through your retail transformation and adapt to this new, omnichannel, store experience.
How?
Manthan’s Retail Analytics solution can proactively give you business recommendations around attribution, inventory, assortment localization and help you forecast demand better. In other words, imagine a solution that can weave inventory and market intelligence that could enable your store to place a ‘Available for Click and Collect’ button next to specific items on your e-commerce portal.
Their Customer Analytics solution gives you a single view of the customer which gets you making product recommendations that is actually ‘backed by data’. You can segment guests, analyze your promotions, and execute an omnichannel campaign through their powerful ‘machine learning based’ recommendation engine. Couple this with the execution capability of their TargetOne solution, you can truly bring the whole, ‘show ads on their laptop, collect orders placed on a tablet and send a message on the mobile’ experience to life.
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