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What will it take to transform BOPIS ops from just okay to great?

February 20, 2019Written by Guest contributor

Photo: Target

WayfinD staff Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of an article from WayfinD, a quarterly e-magazine filled with insights, trends and predictions from the retail and foodservice experts at WD Partners. A WD Partners study from almost six years ago found BOPIS (buy online, pickup in-store) to be the number one ranked technology consumers wanted (86 percent put it in the top two boxes). Fast forward four years: we found the appeal for BOPIS went down 27 percent to only 59 percent (top two box score), and yet usage had gone up 17 percent. Essentially consumers still wanted BOPIS and were using it, but their satisfaction with it was tanking. Retailers just weren’t getting it. They were making customers come into the store to pick-up their orders. Customers had to stand in lines with people returning items, getting price adjustments, etc. No standard place for BOPIS within their stores existed so it was a mystery every time you walked in. And they weren’t getting orders right. So, here we are in 2019. And it’s gotten better. Seventy percent of online shoppers have used BOPIS and 55 percent of the top U.S. retailers are now offering BOPIS (compared to 44 percent in 2016). Yet a huge opportunity exists to make it even better. Have you ever pulled into a store parking lot only to see the best parking spots designated for BOPIS — and not a single car in one of those spots? Or maybe there’s only one measly BOPIS marked spot and it happens to be buried in middle of the lot? Or one of our favorites is pulling into a BOPIS spot only to be directed to call a number to tell them you’re there and then having to wait an additional 10+ minutes for them to bring your order. First world problems, right? But the point is, most BOPIS solutions are not ready to scale to 40 percent of transactions as predicted for coming years. More robust deployments that consider store operations, staffing logistics and product inventory systems are required. Additionally, new technology from Google-owned Waze allows customers to seamlessly communicate with retailers their location and anticipated pick-up time, allowing for a frictionless experience across the board. There’s room to grow. Get better. Be smarter. Can you imagine what BOPIS looks like in 2025?

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