ASDA conducted a poll on it’s Facebook and found that although people were happy to shop online on it’s website. This was merely to browse the current offers available and to make up shopping lists to use instore.
This should be food for thought (excuse the pun) for other retailers. Since many Retailers seem to be stuck in the 1980′s style of retail whereby they seem to believe that consumers will be happy to get a different level of shopping from their instore shopping to their online shopping experience. By this, I mean that they believe that if a customer wishes to purchase something that is not available instore, they’ll be happy to pay delivery charges, wait between a few days and upto a week in some cases for their goods to arrive. Then in the case of clothes, they try them just to find that they ordered the wrong size and end up with the dilemma of sending them back through the post, returning them to the store or making do. Apparently this is acceptable practice? Consumers being the cheery bunch that they are wont mind any of this and all hark back to the days when Catalogue shopping was big business…
Well, from the example of ASDA, it appears to be very much different and the uneasy alliance of store and online catalogue appears to be in need of a shake up! There are still high street stores who have not yet managed to understand the concept of operating a Retail store and an e-commerce website. Companies such as Argos allow consumers to reserve goods online and then collect them from whichever store has the item in stock. This is a very good use of the Clicks and Mortar model of business, blurring the lines between the traditional forms of shopping and the new modern Web 2.0 expectations of a modern era. They of course also offer home delivery, just like a conventional e-commerce website. The sooner more stores wake upto the concept of ‘Reserve and Collect’, the better. If the product is not in the store, staff should either be able to order to store the items the consumer would like to purchase or even allow the consumer to order the items online. It would then be upto the Retailer if the consumer either paid for them online or in store when they went to pick them up from whichever store was convenient to them a few days later. This would be beneficial for anyone able to collect the items at a convenient time, not when the couriers come knocking and of course saving the consumer the cost of postage.
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