If buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) is eating into your company’s profit margins, it’s time to make your customers and bank account happier with the RoadieXD™ on-demand, same-day delivery solution.
The days when customers lined up at the checkout counter to purchase the goods they needed disappeared during the global pandemic. Buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS), which affords the recommended social distancing from other shoppers, quickly became the most popular alternative.
Also known as click-and-collect, the option was convenient for customers but costly and resource-intensive for retailers, not all of which were set up to accommodate the shift. Infrastructure had to be put into place, inventory accurately located and tracked and staff members assigned to the job.
BOPIS isn’t as easy as it looks
In the customer’s eyes, BOPIS meant pulling items into an order and placing them at or near a checkout area. That sounds simple, but, in reality, the BOPIS infrastructure is different and much more complex than anything retailers have ever dealt with before. The complexity arises because:
- First, retailers must distribute inventory to the store, essentially paying to move it twice.
- Then, the store must dedicate an associate to picking the item off the shelf and fulfilling the online order, further increasing costs.
- This can eliminate or cut into profit margins, especially on small orders.
- The issues multiply quickly for retailers with multiple stores or fulfillment centers.
There are also customer service and operational issues to consider. Early on, major retailers dedicated areas for shoppers to pick up their orders, for example, but they didn’t always keep those pickup areas staffed during regular store hours. A customer who showed up to pick up a big and bulky item 10 minutes after the BOPIS desk closed for the night went home empty-handed and had to return the next day to get their order.
“When the customer comes into the store to pick up their order, they are typically expecting efficiency (hence a primary reason for using BOPIS); therefore, the store associate needs to know exactly where the picked order is located,” retail consultancy Parker Avery explains.
“This demands not only dedicated space for storing the picked items,” it continues, “but also a simple methodology for locating customer orders, as well as adequate staging or packaging for easy transfer to the customer.”
Stores weren’t made for this
According to a recent NAPCO survey, retailers said the speed of preparing orders for in-store pickup is their biggest BOPIS challenge, followed by a lack of dedicated in-store space for collection.
“Stores weren’t designed for fulfillment and pickup of online orders, and the staff working in them more often than not weren’t hired or trained to handle such tasks,” NAPCO points out. “BOPIS has added another layer of responsibility to the store associate’s role.”
Despite these roadblocks, BOPIS remains a core strategy for retailers that want to meet consumers where they are. According to a recent Capital One survey, 87% of retailers offer BOPIS, and 97.2 million Americans (34.2% of all U.S. consumers) regularly select this option when placing orders.
Domestic BOPIS retail sales totaled $113.2 billion in 2023 (10.1% of all e-commerce sales) and are expected to reach $154.3 billion next year. These sales are growing at an annual rate of 16.8%, about 43% faster than the e-commerce market as a whole. Numbers such as these are hard for retailers to ignore even as orders pile up, physical space becomes limited and employees have to be allocated to the task.
On-demand delivery opens new BOPIS doors
What if there was a way to accommodate shoppers’ same-day needs without over-taxing the retailer’s physical, financial and human resources?
Enter RoadieXD™, an affordable logistics solution that gives retailers the option to use same-day delivery instead of the BOPIS model. With the largest local same-day footprint in the country, the Roadie network of 200,000 independent drivers spans 29,000+ U.S. ZIP codes and can reach 97% of U.S. households with ultrafast delivery.
Customers won’t have to wait for in-store pickup or endure slow shipping times because RoadieXD™ enables purchases to be delivered directly to their doorsteps, often within hours of the online order. This leads to happier customers, potentially higher order values and internal resources that are freed up to focus on more strategic work.
Other key benefits include:
- Streamlined inventory management: Because RoadieXD™ uses cross-dock facilities, there’s no need to allocate stock for potential pickups. Simply load FTL or LTL trailers for transfer to a RoadieXD™ facility.
- Gives back valuable floor space: That area in the warehouse, fulfillment center or store that was carved out for BOPIS management can now be put to better use.
- Do more with less: Reallocate employees and resources to more strategic tasks than filling orders for walk-in customers.
- Big and bulky is no problem: RoadieXD™ can handle the big and bulky items that traditional BOPIS setups can’t efficiently tackle.
- It’s always there when you need it: With an on-demand network of drivers, using RoadieXD™ helps retailers scale their same-day delivery capacity up or down based on demand.
Level up your same-day delivery game
With speed of delivery being a top consideration for consumers, and with 55% of them willing to change retailers in order to get their goods faster, retailers that offer same-day delivery hold a competitive advantage.
RoadieXD™ gives retailers a flexible, affordable same-day delivery solution that surpasses the limitations of BOPIS and ultimately leads to happier customers, higher sales volumes and better profitability.
