“Sites offering buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS) grew digital revenue by 27% compared with 13% for those not offering BOPIS.”
— Salesforce Research
Retailers are leveraging in-store inventories and personnel to capitalize on the rise in eCommerce. And blending the online experience with the physical retail BOPIS model is way ahead in contributing a rapid growth. Customers are opting for BOPIS, whether because it allows an in-person element to online shopping or it’s convenient & fast. BOPIS allows B2C and B2B businesses to go direct to consumer, sell online fast and scale up during unexpected surges in demand.
So, to ensure your fulfillment options meet customers’ expectations, we recommend focusing on your BOPIS strategy, as achieving a successful BOPIS model is easier said than done. To offer a stellar customer experience and gain economic benefits for your business, start focusing on your BOPIS strategy today. Here are three tips to ensure an effective BOPIS strategy optimization.
1. Convenient Shopping Experience
Does your site have a BOPIS-only filter?
Is the BOPIS-only CTA button visible?
Do customers receive the notifications on time?
Do your store associates know clearly about the exchange and refund steps?
To ensure your BOPIS experience is top-notch, ask yourself the following questions. Then comes the next step to educate your customer about the concept, so shoppers know that you are offering the BOPIS option. Make them feel comfortable about the model by explaining how it works on the Home page or the checkout page. You can increase the conversion rate by providing a clear idea about the buying, checkout, and pickup procedure.
2. Recognize Store Associates
The next step for optimizing BOPIS Strategy is ensuring that your employee and Store operation is entirely in sync. Train your associates to easily prepare BOPIS orders to help customers find and pick up their items in-store and ensure they have a clear idea that BOPIS orders aren’t just counted as online sales. You need to manage offline and online sales as single entities in terms of profits and loss statements. And regardless of where orders were fulfilled, you have to give full credit for online orders to store personnel. Or else your store associate may become disinterested in prioritizing BOPIS orders if they aren’t counted toward their store’s sales targets which can degrade the BOPIS shopping experience.
3. Order Management System
An order management system helps merchants to manage their inventory and fulfill orders. Customers are more willing to buy the products from the site, which offers the best experience. Convenience is the secret of winning the game. The next-gen order management system integrates seamlessly with an eCommerce solution to process orders flawlessly regardless of channel.
Start by bridging the online and in-store experience, and Salesforce Order Management System can help. It will integrate all the Systems that impact pre and post-purchase experience. You can quickly get to the next phase of omnichannel using OMS as all powered by the world’s #1 CRM and can deliver fast and easy shipping, transparent order status, and hassle-free returns at a global scale. This gives you a unified view of the preferences, purchases, and order information of each customer
Considering that most shoppers use their smartphones and tablets to purchase items, you can’t support a successful BOPIS strategy if your website isn’t designed with mobile devices in mind and loads within seconds. The concept of an omnipotent shopping experience planted the spotlight over mobile commerce. To build and customize your mobile site, SFRA is Salesforce’s new approach.
It provides an entire library of core site capabilities include cart, checkout, homepage, product detail pages, and more. It helps you to give your shoppers an incredible experience. It enables a flexible deployment with decoupled layers of commerce services, scalability to pivot quickly, and the speed to make accelerated updates. And what lies at the core of headless commerce are APIs and API-led connectivity. It uses a conventional Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and sits outside of the platform API layer. Maintain and update your storefront easily with the SFRA customization model.
Steps to facilitate an efficient curbside fulfillment
You need to focus on streamlining the pickup experience with inventory management and making the fulfillment option easily accessible to optimize your BOPIS strategy. Recent surveys show that 61% of shoppers made an additional, unplanned purchase when they arrived at the store to pick up their order. BOPIS is a potent tool that can bring significant economic benefits to your company
Steps to optimize BOPIS strategy:
- Clear message through email or text to customers about pickup instructions. Instruction must include what steps to take once they arrive, where to park, how to reach the pickup point, any receipt code they may need to provide on arrival, etc.
- Make clear signage on the site about all the instructions – where to park, how to contact the store, where to exchange, how to get a refund.
- Assign dedicated BOPIS associates to fulfill the purchase. Have trained and designated employees to expedite the whole process to avoid confusion during pickup/exchange/refund procedures.
Choose your pickup location wisely as it has a significant impact on upsell opportunities. To give customers a more personalized experience, you should assess your current buy online, pickup in-store strategy to see where you can improve the program. A successful BOPIS program can help you to establish in-person connections with your consumers.
Conclusion
During the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for direct to consumer is accelerated dramatically. To help companies quickly grow and evolve to stay relevant with customers across channels, just set up an online storefront is not enough. To find success in the digital-first economy storefront, speed, intelligence, flexibility, and scalability must have. In this transition, BOPIS has become the lifeline for many retailers. Schedule a call with ETG Salesforce eCommerce experts to enhance your BOPIS Strategy.
About ETG Digital
ETG is a Crest Level Salesforce Partner headquartered in Plano, Texas. We are ISO 9001:2015 certified company with a global delivery center in Hyderabad, India. We have dedicated teams of professionals spanning continents located in US, Canada, UAE, UK, Australia and India. Our ability to maintain talent hubs in multiple locations and working on projects for clients from various domains gives us a very unique advantage. An advantage to leverage proven technologies like Salesforce Commerce, Sales, Service, Partner and Marketing Clouds and using them to deliver tailor made solutions for clients to suit their business requirements.
If you are looking to take your business into the next league, you are at the right place. Connect with us at info@etg.digital or call us at +1 469 666 1119
