Commentary

Mobile Shopping & the In-Store Pickup

The offline and online worlds of mobile commerce continue to become more closely intertwined.

Though the idea of ordering something online and picking it up in a store seems so obvious a concept, it it’s taken quite a while for it to catch on in any big way, at least from the merchant side.

And the notion of mobile shopping combined with same-day pickup is not necessarily what Amazon has been longing for physical retailers to embrace.

Now one of the what I call mobile facilitators, those companies that deploy technology to empower others to conduct better mobile commerce, has introduced another behind-the-scenes technology to make that same-day pickup idea more commonplace.

California-based Retailligence has its roots in providing real-time inventory data to companies that enable mobile shopping.

The idea is that someone looking to find a particular product at the moment should be shown only merchants who have that product in stock right now. Retailigence has been the engine providing this inventory data for some time.

As is typical of many of the mobile empowerment engines, Retailigence is expanding beyond its initial service, adding yet another engine component, this time focusing on combining ordering with in-store pickup.

The technology add allows mobile shoppers to search, find and reserve products for purchase at local retailers.

Retailigence refers to their new thing as an omni-channel solution, though it really is simply linking mobile buying to brick and mortar pickup.

The reality is that mobile consumers are shopping all the time, mainly because they can. The issue of focus for Retailigence is connecting that mobile shopping more closely with getting the actual thing purchased.

“Retailers and brands need to engage shoppers and move them along the path to purchase as they search and browse online, from their mobile devices and even in-store as they walk the aisles,” said Jeremy Geiger, CEO of Retailigence.

From the consumer’s standpoint, same-day pickup eliminates delivery wait times and shipping fees. 

We know from numerous studies that no matter what shopping activity happens via mobile, consumers want to go to the store for the actual purchase.

It will be interesting to see if this potential enabler changes the behaviors of consumers to come to expect that they can shop through mobile and pick up the item on the way home.

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