Buy Online-Pick-Up-In-Store, Grocery Style. Hannaford’s Efficiency Experiment
Written by Evan SchumanAugust 3rd, 2011
The 178-store Hannaford grocery chain is trialing a grocery tweak on buy-online-pick-up-in-store, where shoppers select almost anything from the test store's 40,000 SKUs and then drive to the store, where the order is loaded into the customer's trunk. The effort, which involves three isolated temperature-controlled holding areas, pits employee efficiency against thin grocery profit margins. The Hannaford-to-go program is also likely to cost the chain some impulse purchases, but that's the downside of any E-Commerce effort. The question is whether this program will lure in more customers and/or build more loyalty from existing shoppers.
The trial, which was launched in mid-March at one New Hampshire store and is slated to expand to a second store "in the fall," has "gotten off to a better start than we expected. We found that [customers] shopped the whole store. That surprised us a bit," said Mike Norton, a spokesman for the five-state regional chain, with stores in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and New York.
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2 Comments | Read Buy Online-Pick-Up-In-Store, Grocery Style. Hannaford’s Efficiency Experiment
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-Christine
August 4th, 2011 at 7:20 am
Tesco has also been experimenting with this in the UK, leveraging their existing home delivery picking website and infrastructure. A couple of stores on trial at the moment
August 4th, 2011 at 7:50 am
This is the model we are pursuing for inner-city retailing and it has no choice but to work. This purchase-online/pickup in store model accomodates just-in-time inventory and better internal control for many high-density areas that are considered “food deserts” and have no access to retailers nearby.
In terms of impacting impulse buys, I believe it will greatly enhanced impulse buys as retailers will have more time to programmatically scan the pre-ordered virtual basket and generate recommended items by the time the customer picks up. Even further we can text deals to their mobile phone while they are in route.
I believe this model will work best in urban environments as I described for small-format groceries, micro-retailing and pop-up store operations.