Overview
Curbside & In-Store Pickup-the ability for customers to place orders that they can then pick up at your locations-is rapidly becoming one of the most important features in the e-commerce space. Modern Retail has put in work to make sure that no matter how your business works, we can implement this feature for you. This article will go over the main ways we can implement Curbside & In-Store Pickup for your site.
What Are My Options?
Broadly speaking, each of these options will still work the same way in your backend; these options are primarily based around how Curbside & In-Store Pickup will appear on your main site. If Curbside & In-store Pickup are the body, then these options are the outfits on top.
Option A
Option A has the customer select the location for Curbside & In-Store Pickup every time they add a product to their bag. Locations without inventory for the selected product would not display on that product's page. While this is a functional solution that has its upsides, it places some burden on the customer, and makes it possible to accidentally oversell products if the customer places more into their bag than the location they've picked has in stock.
Option B
Option B has the customer select their location or local delivery in the shopping cart, after they've already selected all their items. Stores that cannot fulfill the order are grayed out, so the customer can only select options that can fulfill the entire order. The sole downside to this is that if a customer puts together an order that no store can fulfill, all options will display as grayed out. To counteract this, we display the inventory for each store on every product page, so customers know where they can order different items from.
Option C
Option C is much like Option B, except we don't show inventory on product pages. We'll allow the customer to pick a location regardless of that location's inventory, so they can select whichever option they want. The downside to this is you would have to internally manage cases where a location doesn't have the requisite inventory, which depending on your business and inventory can be difficult.
Option D
Option D is a sort of mix of options A & B. Option D has the customer select locations for each product, as in option A, but this process happens in the shopping bag, as with option B. Locations without the appropriate inventory would still be grayed out, but only for the specific product that they lack inventory for. This means a customer could "split" their order, picking up items 1 & 2 from Location #1 and items 3 & 4 from Location #2.
If you have further questions about these options, or if you want help deciding which works best for your business, please feel free to submit a support request.