A win-win scenario for consumers and retailers: Why click-and-collect is the future of shopping

However, high expectations of ease and convenience still face a common pinch point: delivery. Industry stats suggest that in the past 12 months, as many as one in five retail customers had to rearrange a parcel delivery for goods ordered online. Consumers are demanding flexible and innovative delivery solutions, and this is leading to a rapid uptake in click-and-collect.

On the face of it, home delivery always seemed like the ultimate answer to the convenience of e-retail. However, this assumption ignored the fact that the people most attracted to the ease of shopping online are the very same people whose busy lives are not well suited to waiting in for couriers (or drones, for that matter).

It's this conundrum that led Amazon to introduce pickup locations, and even install their own lockers in high street locations around the UK. Now an increasing number of retailers have identified click-and-collect as the future of online retail.

As Barclaycard note in their recent report on UK consumer spending, 2014 was the year that click-and-collect entered the mainstream, with more than half the population going as far as to claim they would happily hunt for online bargains on Christmas Day.

Industry association IMGR is estimating that e-retail sales in the UK are set for another 12 per cent increase this year, with volumes of £116m by the end of 2015. Research by eBay and Conlumino suggest that British shoppers will have made an average of three extra high street trips in the run-up to the festive season, purely in order to collect goods purchased online.

All of which is helping convince major high street names that click-and-collectis the way of the future - and even the saviour of bricks and mortar. Debenhams, Matalan, Currys and Tesco are now all strongly promoting their click-and-collect channels, and John Lewis neatly demonstrated how to maximise the potential of click-and-collect in December. Boosting their click-and-collect orders by 62 per cent year-on-year helped the upmarket chain deliver a healthy 4.8 per cent sales increase in the run-up to Christmas.

Perhaps the key to explaining the surging success of click-and-collect is recognising that it's a genuine win-win scenario. For shoppers, click-and-collect makes sense for all kinds of reasons, from avoiding the dreaded missed delivery to being able to avoid extra shipping fees and get items on the same day they were ordered.

For retailers, click-and-collect can help save costs and widen the range of products they are able to sell online, all whilst giving consumers the freedom and convenience they demand. It also helps maintain that critical physical connection with customers, demonstrating that online shopping is perfectly compatible with upselling and impulse buys in store.

Still, it's not just about the big, established players who have the capacity to operate large scale click-and-collect services. One of the main factors that points to click-and-collect as the future of retail is the lowering of barriers to entry, making the system more cost effective for smaller businesses.

Click-and-collect offers a lifeline to local shops that have been losing out to consumers' increasing desire to browse and compare products online.

Click-and-collect promises to unite online and traditional retail, and there's little doubt that its popularity will continue to grow in 2015.

Web: www.barclaycard.com

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