Monday, January 03, 2011

Best Buy: Innovating In The Pick Up Options For Optimizing Multichannel Advantages

Multichannel is becoming a norm nowadays. Either brick & mortar companies are going online, or pure players are finding ways to reach their customers in the real world thanks to pick up options. What is for sure is that multichannel is starting to become a norm.

But there is still room for improvement as the Internant and brick & mortar world are still struggling to click.

Best Buy hence has innovated:
  • Customers may now pick up their products at the company's warehouses. For a national chain like Best Buy, it is very interesting to provide this service, as they may own several warehouses across country. Pick up at the warehouse may also decrease the logistic costs, as some part of the merchandise will not need to transit through the stores. The consumer electronics retailer also is letting customers pick up purchases directly from its warehouses to avoid delivery charges and scheduling conflicts for large items such as appliances, or to save time on orders that must be shipped to a store.

    Best Buy says it launched the new delivery options, which it calls Store Pickup Plus, to expand on the free shipping promotions it periodically offers online, as well as to allow consumers to avoid shipping fees, receive products more quickly, eliminate concerns about package delivery and increase confidence that products will be available.

  • Thanks to a top of the line supply chain information system, they are able to tell to customers to pick up some of their orders 45 minutes after having ordered them online.

Now, I wanted to add something else about multichannel retailing. In France, drive ins are getting very popular for hypermarket chains. Some other type of retailers have started to use this system, like an optician in the north of France. But what about ecommerce? Wouldn't it be an efficient system to equip warehouses of these type of drive ins, in order to turn their warehouse into stores?

What do you think about it?