Shopping Differently?
With 2020 firmly in the rearview mirror, I wondered if the boom in online buying will recede again or will shoppers choose e-commerce even more often and for more things.
I found a U.S. survey by Upwave, a marketing analytics company, asking respondents whether they will shop differently in a year from now than a year ago.
What would be your guess?
Here is how the 1,944 respondents answered the question (multiple answers were possible):
49.2% said that they would do more shopping online,
33.7% said that they would buy online and pick up in-store,
26.4% said that they would buy online and use curbside pickup, and
20.3% said that they would not shop differently.
I found it interesting that 60.1% of the respondents expected to continue to more heavily use online shopping and would choose a curbside (26.4%) or in-store (33.7%) pickup option. Is this due to convenience, or have the pandemic-induced behavioral changes become the new norm? Perhaps, there will be another survey trying to answer this question.
Anyway, if you run an e-commerce store based on Shopify's platform, you can enable the buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) option with just a few clicks - assuming that you also have a physical store location. Go to
Settings > Shipping and Delivery.
Under Local Delivery, click Manage beside the location you want to enable.
Then select This location offers local pickup.
Under Information at checkout, set the expected pickup time and write a pickup notification.
Click Save. You are all set. At checkout, shoppers will now see a pickup-in-store option.
In my view, Shopify does an excellent job in the checkout process, offering shoppers three different ways to receive their purchases: shipping, local pickup, and local delivery. If you can, and if it makes sense for your business, take advantage of these options.
