The Rush to Click and Collect

 

 

Click and Collect

The big retailers and particularly FMCG are falling over themselves to provide a

click and collect service for their customers but I wonder if it's not counterproductive.
 

Supermarkets spend millions of dollars on

advertising each year with the goal of getting more people into their stores.

So why are they now spending even more to stop them coming in?

This practice has been around for a while, when I first heard about it I thought; "why would customers use this?" and the answer is that they hate shopping for groceries which led to my second thought "how have we managed to make grocery shopping such a source of dread?" 


It's hard to see how this encourages "shopping"

Proponents of click and collect, the type that the supermarkets are implementing where a customer buys from their online store and collects in their physical store, claim that customers spend more when they use the click and collect service. They would have you believe that a customer buys online to avoid going grocery shopping and then the same customer goes....er....shopping .....when they come in to collect their goods.
 
Is it just me or does that sound unlikely?

Let's get this straight, when you get the customer to enter your store - they spend more. They buy stuff they don't need and they buy more of it.
So instead of spending money to make it easier for them to stay away, how about investing that money in making their in-store experience better?

The CFO will argue that the millions spent on click and collect is a better investment than hundreds of millions on store refurbishment but I'm not suggesting that the Supermarkets need to refurbish.

I am suggesting that perhaps the money could be better spent on the little things that mean a lot like training staff to smile and engage their customers - it's not much but it's a start and even one (measly) million dollars would buy a lot of smiles.

The rush to implement click and collect is symptomatic of a much bigger problem. Decision makers have been convinced that technology is the answer to all their problems and in some cases it will be but I can't see how click and collect will do anything other than erode basket size and value.