In Store delivery is probably the biggest challenge for online business. Indeed, E-commerce is still growing, but its growth pace has slowed down a lot lately. The share of retailing made on the Internet is becoming steady, which is a good and a bad sign:
- A good sign because it shows that online business is durable and counts for an important share of the overall retailing
- A bad sign for retailing because most of the growth of retail was based on online activities.
Walmart is trying a new service in its store, allowing online customers to pick up their products in one of Walmart's stores, thanks to a locker system. Here are some pictures of Amazon's ones.
I believe that there is a great opportunity for growth for online retailer thanks to this system:
- They benefit from new delivery places. In the case of Walmart, in a highly visited place.
- They can optimize their supply chain by delivering large quantities of goods in one single place, cutting the cost of the last mile (which is very expensive).
- The system is quite cheap (even though I don't know the fees Walmart may apply to the online retailer, in the caze of Amazon's locker for instance).
- They can skip the problem of deliveries that unsatisfy a lot of online customers. Who has never had a problem of a product that never came, or late, or had to call the post office to know where the mail has been shipped... This system I believe is more secure.
Thanks to this system, I believe that Walmart.com will get more exposure, and a competitive advantage. It is a very easy way to leverage the store network available in order to get market share online.
