How Adobe Commerce is helping drive the next generation of hybrid shopping

COVID-19 altered most consumer behaviors. Today’s shopper doesn’t just appreciate more choice, speed, and convenience — since the pandemic, they’ve come to expect it. Many retailers are responding with innovations that are transforming the shopping experience and what it means to “go to the store.”

According to our August 2023 Pulse Survey, embedding new technologies into their business model is one of the top strategic priority for retail and consumer markets leaders, with many companies already taking steps to deliver a seamless combination of physical and digital shopping experiences. The National Retail Federation¹ reports that many consumers are wholeheartedly embracing these new, omnichannel strategies — and they’re not looking back. As distinctions between online and offline shopping behaviors increasingly tend to blur, one model in particular, Buy Online, Pick-up In-Store or BOPIS, bridges the gap between placing an order and going out shopping — and it’s increasing customer loyalty², average order size³, and improving sales figures for a growing number of retailers.

BOPIS is not a retail trend. For customers of mid-sized and large-scale retail businesses, it is fast becoming an expected option and necessary convenience. With 67% of shoppers using BOPIS at least once⁴ in the first half of 2023, online or in-store is no longer an either-or. Today’s customer is increasingly interested in an experience that spans both: they want to place an order and have the option to fulfill their purchase in-store or curbside.

While the concept of ordering a new blender, TV or lunch on a device and picking it up at a physical location may sound simple enough, the path to bringing a BOPIS solution online and into the store may introduce new complexities. It involves the precise orchestration of people, processes and technologies, helping address almost everything from ordering and inventory management to picking and staging efficiently.

For businesses that are looking to meet this growing demand for a hybrid physical-digital shopping option, there are digital commerce capabilities that help make implementation and adoption of BOPIS solutions easier:

• Auto-generated order queues that help provide employees with an overview of orders and their statuses so they can prioritize order picking based on fulfillment promise date and time.
• Modular order staging that sends a notice to employees to prepare orders for pick-up.
• Single, multi-order and batch picking that brings efficiencies to the picking process, making it possible to help improve margins by picking more items per hour than would be possible with manual picking capabilities.
• Pricing updates and out-of-stock substitutions that help leverage in-store inventory analysis to enhance the customer experience and maintain sales.
• Arrival notifications and check-in capabilities that helps enable a seamless handoff by integrating customer and delivery driver arrival notifications and tracking, to reduce wait times.

While digital commerce software can help enable industry leading store fulfillment experiences, a successful BOPIS solution may require more than leading technologies. Highly successful BOPIS implementations are those that begin with an aligned strategy, and have an improved operating model — from front office to back office.

To help facilitate a successful BOPIS activation and launch, retailers should:

1. Take the time to build consensus around a shared vision
Improve outcomes by engaging key stakeholders around the business early and often. By defining the aims of a new customer experience and rallying the organization around an evolved omnichannel strategy, the foundation will be set for a broad-based, business-wide transformation effort.

2. Create an experience that helps serve customers where, when and how they shop
Confirm the experience is the right fit for the audience, identifying target customers, their buying profiles and developing target-state journeys by customer group that meet their respective needs.

3. Evolve the operating model to help enable BOPIS
Once the strategy is set and objectives are clear, it’s critical to understand whether existing capabilities across people, process and technology can support a BOPIS solution — and what needs to happen to make it work. The target operating model must consider a number of foundational capabilities — from the way inventory is managed and tracked, to smart order routing based on business rules, store layouts (front of store as well as backroom), labor management and staff upskilling as well as data and analytics. 

In short

BOPIS is a necessary convenience for consumers, but it can raise important questions for the business that technology alone cannot solve: Will fulfillment be handled by employees or a third party? Who does the training? How do current processes need to change? What’s the optimal approach to picking the products off the shelf? How can more orders be fulfilled while maintaining inventory? How can orders be picked in store more efficiently? The right strategy considers all the angles — for the customer and employee — to help accelerate a successful rollout.

How PwC can help

PwC is helping retailers develop seamless omnichannel capabilities with a holistic approach that weaves together an entire, end-to-end BOPIS solution leveraging Adobe Commerce. Starting with what makes every business unique — the layout of the store and the needs of the customer — PwC helps establish a strategy, define the experience, assess existing capabilities, and execute an internal adoption plan that rallies all stakeholders.

_{¹National Retail Federation, “3 things to know about the 2023 consumer”, 2023. https://nrf.com/blog/3-things-to-know-about-2023-consumer
²National Retail Federation, “Convenience and the consumer”, 1997-2023, https://cdn.nrf.com/sites/default/files/2020-01/cv8-convenience-final-jan-9-2020.pdf
³Signifyd, Buy Online Pick Up In Store (BOPIS), 2023, https://cloud.kapostcontent.net/pub/355fb01e-5ead-4962-91bf-cc4a923c1506/bopis-whitepaper?kui=rNZuEHRwUIO34ckGCEFn-Q
⁴INVESP, Buy Online Pick Up In Store – Statistics and Trends [Infographic], 2006-2023, https://www.invespcro.com/blog/buy-online-pick-up-in-store-bopis/}