Click & Collect Results for UK Christmas 2015

An increasing number of retailers offer a Click & Collect service to make the customer shopping experience simpler, quicker and more convenient. Customers are able to purchase items online and then pick up the order from a store of their choice. With the Christmas shopping period gone, the JDA and Centiro Christmas Customer Pulse Report 2016 suggests that 41% of online Christmas shoppers used Click & Collect in 2015. Even though the number of Click & Collect customers is growing, the survey shows that there are still problems that retailers need to solve in order to deliver a successful Click & Collect service.

The report surveyed more than 2000 UK shoppers, who shared their shopping experience during the Christmas 2015 period. Half of them spent more than 50% of their Christmas shopping online. From those online shoppers, almost half used a Click & Collect service. According to the report, the main reason why customers chose that type of service was to avoid delivery charges (56%). Yet, some retailers like Tesco, Sainsbury’s and ASDA, which offer free Click & Collect service, require a minimum of £20- £40 spent for the free of charge service. Another key reason why customers used Click & Collect was because the service was more convenient than home delivery. Almost half of the people surveyed agreed with that statement.

Despite the popularisation of Click & Collect as the JDA and Centiro Christmas Customer Pulse Report 2016 suggests, 36% of the Christmas shoppers encountered issues with their Click & Collect orders. In contrast, last year 47% of the customers faced problems with the Click & Collect service, which illustrates significant improvement since then. 31% of the customers claimed that they had to wait a long time, because there were not enough staff members in-store. Another notable issue with the Click & Collect service was the absence of dedicated collection area in-store (31%). A quarter of the surveyed customers said that staff were unable to or took a long time to locate goods in-store.

John Lewis customers’ shopping experience this Christmas proved successful with half of their online orders using the Click & Collect service, higher than the industry average. The retailer is working with Localz to enhance its Click & Collect experience by adopting Localz technology to improve customer wait times and the efficiency of the service. During the period from mid-November until the end of December, there were over 11,000 Click & Collect orders processed by Localz in two John Lewis shops using the new system in London at the Brent Cross and Croydon shops. Our solution significantly reduced the average collection time during this peak period.