My Site-To-Store Delivery Experience
I had the pleasure of ordering online with the masses on Thanksgiving Day, and wanted to share my experience with you. I was on the lookout for an Xbox 360 and had been checking out all the Black Friday sales ads, online and in print, hoping that someone would have a great deal. As usual, I kept checking all the price-shopping websites along with a number of retailers’ websites to see who had the best possible deal at the best price. Lo and behold, in this case it turned out to be Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart happened to have the best deal available on Thursday, November 27. After many hours of research I decided to jump in and make the purchase on Thanksgiving morning. The Wal-Mart site offered a bundled package for the Xbox—not unique in the fact of offering a bundled package, but unique because it turned out you could select the components in the bundled package: different consoles, controllers and games. Everything went well with the purchase on the site and then I decided to give Wal-Mart’s Ship-To-Store option a shot. Order online, have your order shipped to the store for pickup and pay no shipping charges. Sounded good to me, so I gave it a whirl.
I identified my local Wal-Mart store during the checkout process, and immediately after placing the order received a confirmation for the 4 items I ordered in the bundle, each with an expected in-store date of between 12/09/08 and 12/15/08. Off to eat Thanksgiving turkey.
An e-mail arrived on December 3rd stating that 3 of the 4 items had arrived in the store. The e-mail contained the instructions for pickup: simply print the e-mail containing the order barcode, find the Site-To-Store pickup area in Wal-Mart, show ID and that’s it. So off to Wal-Mart I went on Friday, December 5th. The instructions also noted that most of the Site-To-Store pickup areas are located in the rear of the store and sure enough, that is exactly where it was. The person working the register took my printed e-mail, asked for identification and promptly went back to find the order. Within a minute he was back, the order was scanned and I was out the door with my 3 items, receipt in hand (not bad considering I’m usually the one that picks the slowest moving line with the slowest moving associate). The next day I received an e-mail confirming that the items had been picked up.
On Monday, December 8th, I received an email for the 4th item. This time, I used the option to identify another person for pickup. On Tuesday, that person picked up the last item without any issues. On Wednesday I received an e-mail confirming that the last item had been picked up. All in all, it was a great experience.
When I picked up the 3 items, I asked the associate if many people were using the Ship-To-Store program. The comment was, “Oh my goodness, don’t you see all the products lying around here? We are out of storage space in the back of the store and don’t have anywhere else to put things. I don’t know what we are going to do. There have been a lot of people using the Ship-To-Store option.” Judging from the number of orders that were there, it certainly looked like many people are using the service.
From my vantage point, the process worked extremely well, was easy to use and didn’t cost anything for shipping. What’s your experience?
Joseph (Tocky) Lawrence is Vice President of F. Curtis Barry & Company, a multichannel operations and fulfillment consulting firm with expertise in multichannel systems, warehouse, call center, inventory, and benchmarking; Learn more online at: http://www.fcbco.com
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except that the Site to Store program is down today, at store #2044 anyway, don’t know if the problem is system-wide. Store manager said it will be down 24-48 hours, can you imagine the backup in an operation the size of Walmart? They can’t check items into the system after, e.g. Fedex delivers it, ergo it can’t be checked out when you sign for it. Even if it’s only a local problem at the one store, there is apparently no contingency plan for what to do with the incoming merchandise piling up in their finite storage space.