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I don't think most people realize how hard online-to-local-pickup is for a retailer. "Interested in local pickup? Give us a call." is going to be a better custo

I don't think most people realize how hard online-to-local-pickup is for a retailer. "Interested in local pickup? Give us a call." is going to be a better customer experience 9 times out of 10. I hope Square gets it. Retailers - many of them with limited resources and technical skills - face big technical, UI, and logistical issues. I'll give one implementation example that shows all three; this applies to all retailers who don't stock everything in the store OR have multiple locations. The retailer must essentially keep availability counts for items that can be sold online (if different), then a separate list per store. These lists must be accurate or you're going to have angry customers showing up to grab items you don't have - and anyone who has done retail knows how hard accurate inventory can be, especially with entry-level staff. Once inventory is accurate, these retailers must then program their sites to show which items are available for pickup at which locations. THEN if you want to allow customers to pick up items that aren't in the store, you need to communicate when they can pick it up based on delivery time. It gets complicated: do you have the customer choose their closest store up front, even if they don't want to do local pickup? This implementation wastes online buyers' time and creates a barrier to browsing. Do you have customers choose the store when they check out? If so, the option might not be available for the items they've chosen thereby frustrating your customer. Do they choose the store on the product page? The product page is usually your busiest page already, and you generally don't want to add any steps between it and checkout. Regardless of which option you choose, you then have to figure out how to deal with available at nearby locations. Do you really want your user selecting all 3 nearby locations to check availability for pickup? Do you want to display every nearby store that could fulfill pickup? How do you give them the message that it's available nearby? Should you share the negative when it's not available nearby either to prevent them from checking each store? The questions just go on. It's not impossible, but there's a lot that could go wrong here for two or three-store retailer. Even Target got it wrong when I recently tried to buy a wedding gift. They wanted me to wait 2 days for them to deliver a vacuum to the store, even though they had half a dozen in stock when I called.

cpher 12y ago
Not related to Square, per se, but to give you an example from a completely different domain-- car sales. My wife and I were researching minivans in our metro area. We got calls from the dealership asking if we're still interested in the vehicle. We said 'yes'. One hour before we drove to the 'burbs' to check it out, I called to confirm the availability of said vehicle. They said 'yes, it's still here.' We get to the dealership only to find out that the vehicle was sold THE DAY BEFORE. A major car dealership didn't have a system in place to know their inventory at any given point in time. They're a part of a weird "sharing" system between dealerships that can borrow/trade/steal vehicles from their partner dealerships-- all within the same "family" company. But they clearly had no way to track this activity. It seems that inventory control/management spans many domains. Needless to say, they lost our business and we bought from someone else.
- eli 12y ago
  Maybe they wanted to get you on the lot even if the car you wanted was gone.
  - awor 12y ago
    That is definitely not unheard of. The dealers will do whatever they can do to get you to show up.
  - cpher 12y ago
    It's possible, especially given the research available to anyone with a smartphone. They were a big dealership, but the whole experience smelled of a shady used car salesman.
    - jusben1369 12y ago
      Yes sadly the sales guy thinks like this i) Tell him the car is not here they don't come chance of sale = 0%. ii) Tell them the car is here then it's not here but maybe sell them something else = 10%.
- tomkarlo 12y ago
  Car dealerships are apparently still pretty primitive in terms of inventory management - which I guess is unsurprising given that they're mostly small businesses. NPR recently did a piece on one of the top Jeep dealerships on Long Island and they had issues like selling the same car twice, or selling a car that was no longer on the lot, because they were literally using a whiteboard to track what had been sold (and even more informal methods for tracking cars that had been "put on hold".)
  - apayan 12y ago
    I think you're referencing an episode of This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/129-cars http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/1... It was a very informative episode, and did a great job highlighting the financial difficulties faced by car dealerships. It made me sympathetic to their plight, but it's an old business model and I still prefer the direct sales method being championed by Tesla.
milesskorpen 12y ago
It works a lot better for food & drink — Starbucks or your local coffee shop has very few items and they better be in stock! For local inventory — I work for a team which has been trying to collect this data for years. You're 100% right ... it is extraordinarily hard. What's particularly crazy to me is that consumers are already starting to _expect_ it from businesses, and are shocked/angry when it isn't perfectly accurate. I think it is a carry-over from web shopping — it works there, why shouldn't it work in a store?
smackfu 12y ago
I would think most Squares users are one-store retailers, or restaurants.
pyre 12y ago
> Even Target got it wrong when I recently tried to buy a wedding gift. They wanted me to wait 2 days for them to deliver a vacuum to the store, even though they had half a dozen in stock when I called. Had a similar experience ordering from Chapters Indigo around Christmas. I had the option to pick it up in-store, or ship it to my home. It was quicker to ship it to my home, because they wanted to ship it from their warehouse to the store I would pick it up at... even though that store had the item in-stock. This service would take up to 2-3 weeks to happen, IIRC (though I may be remembering wrong).
crater 12y ago
This would work for people who are just trying to avoid the line at the coffee shop, though. Coffee (pastries, etc.) are made-to-order, and I would be fine ordering on an app before I even got in the car if it meant that I didn't have to sit in a line when I got there (assuming it's a busy time)

cpher 12y ago

Not related to Square, per se, but to give you an example from a completely different domain-- car sales. My wife and I were researching minivans in our metro area. We got calls from the dealership asking if we're still interested in the vehicle. We said 'yes'. One hour before we drove to the 'burbs' to check it out, I called to confirm the availability of said vehicle. They said 'yes, it's still here.' We get to the dealership only to find out that the vehicle was sold THE DAY BEFORE. A major car dealership didn't have a system in place to know their inventory at any given point in time. They're a part of a weird "sharing" system between dealerships that can borrow/trade/steal vehicles from their partner dealerships-- all within the same "family" company. But they clearly had no way to track this activity. It seems that inventory control/management spans many domains. Needless to say, they lost our business and we bought from someone else.

eli 12y ago
Maybe they wanted to get you on the lot even if the car you wanted was gone.
- awor 12y ago
  That is definitely not unheard of. The dealers will do whatever they can do to get you to show up.
- cpher 12y ago
  It's possible, especially given the research available to anyone with a smartphone. They were a big dealership, but the whole experience smelled of a shady used car salesman.
  - jusben1369 12y ago
    Yes sadly the sales guy thinks like this i) Tell him the car is not here they don't come chance of sale = 0%. ii) Tell them the car is here then it's not here but maybe sell them something else = 10%.
tomkarlo 12y ago
Car dealerships are apparently still pretty primitive in terms of inventory management - which I guess is unsurprising given that they're mostly small businesses. NPR recently did a piece on one of the top Jeep dealerships on Long Island and they had issues like selling the same car twice, or selling a car that was no longer on the lot, because they were literally using a whiteboard to track what had been sold (and even more informal methods for tracking cars that had been "put on hold".)
- apayan 12y ago
  I think you're referencing an episode of This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/129-cars http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/1... It was a very informative episode, and did a great job highlighting the financial difficulties faced by car dealerships. It made me sympathetic to their plight, but it's an old business model and I still prefer the direct sales method being championed by Tesla.

milesskorpen 12y ago

It works a lot better for food & drink — Starbucks or your local coffee shop has very few items and they better be in stock! For local inventory — I work for a team which has been trying to collect this data for years. You're 100% right ... it is extraordinarily hard. What's particularly crazy to me is that consumers are already starting to _expect_ it from businesses, and are shocked/angry when it isn't perfectly accurate. I think it is a carry-over from web shopping — it works there, why shouldn't it work in a store?

smackfu 12y ago

I would think most Squares users are one-store retailers, or restaurants.

pyre 12y ago

> Even Target got it wrong when I recently tried to buy a wedding gift. They wanted me to wait 2 days for them to deliver a vacuum to the store, even though they had half a dozen in stock when I called. Had a similar experience ordering from Chapters Indigo around Christmas. I had the option to pick it up in-store, or ship it to my home. It was quicker to ship it to my home, because they wanted to ship it from their warehouse to the store I would pick it up at... even though that store had the item in-stock. This service would take up to 2-3 weeks to happen, IIRC (though I may be remembering wrong).

crater 12y ago

This would work for people who are just trying to avoid the line at the coffee shop, though. Coffee (pastries, etc.) are made-to-order, and I would be fine ordering on an app before I even got in the car if it meant that I didn't have to sit in a line when I got there (assuming it's a busy time)