What is BOPIS: Definition, benefits, and examples
Flexible fulfillment is a requirement for retailers today. Ship-to-store, ship-from-store, and BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store) options rule the retail experience.
Customer experience is the undisputed battleground of the modern retail landscape. But how can CX help the planet?
By the end of 2020, researchers expect CX to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. And it’s no wonder. From two-day shipping to free returns to voice-assisted search, retail giant Amazon has raised the bar for customers’ expectations, and its myriad competitors have followed suit.
But as retailers battle to declare a winner on the customer experience front, a definite loser is emerging: the environment. That’s largely due to a customer experience strategy most of us have become addicted to: free returns.
Every year, transporting returned items around the US creates 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions (that’s the same as the annual emissions of three million cars) and five billion additional pounds of wasted packaging.
That’s bad. It’s even worse considering that retailers lose money with each free return – between 20% and 65% of an e-commerce site’s cost of all goods sold.
There’s a better way, a way that balances customer expectations with environmental and business realities. Here’s how online retailers can keep delivering experiences customers expect without breaking the bank – or the planet.
Invest in good product imagery
Unless they’re window shopping, most of your customers aren’t coming to your store to just passively stare at an item and then buy it. They’re engaging with it. They might pick it up, turn it around, try it on, or compare it to the product next to it.
But online shopping, for all its convenience, doesn’t afford your shoppers that opportunity. No wonder the average rate of return in a brick in mortar store is about 8% percent versus nearly 30% for e-commerce. Driving the point home: 64% of shoppers cite items not matching descriptions or expectations as the reason for a product return.
You may not be able to offer the exact same visual experience with digital images as you can in a store, but technology has gotten us pretty close.
For example, interactive 3D imagery gives shoppers the ability to review a product from every angle. And if that item has optional customizations, using virtual configurators to show every possible color, cut, size, and style means that customers can preview exactly how a product will look before they click “buy.”
Additionally, offering augmented reality capabilities for bigger items like furniture gives shoppers the chance to see how a product will actually look inside their homes.
Provide detailed size guides for clothing
Even the best product visuals won’t communicate certain information, though. Take the world of apparel. To further reduce returns, online apparel retailers can couple excellent product imagery with detailed size guides. These strengthen your visuals by offering additional context that could be the difference between a good purchase and a potential return.
Without size guides, customers are much more likely to return clothing. It’s now common practice for people to buy two to three sizes of the same article of clothing and send back the ones that don’t fit. There’s even a term for this practice – “bracketing” – and nearly half of US shoppers admit to doing it. That’s a whole lot of waste, for both your company and the planet.
For inspiration on how to do size guides right, look no further than ASOS, which offers a highly comprehensive guide that breaks down sizing by gender, country, and clothing type. It even includes a step-by-step guide on how to find body measurements on yourself if you’re unsure. Another great feature: ASOS lets shoppers know which size a model is wearing, along with their height.
Those extra details are gold for shoppers who want to make sure your product is the right fit. They also help build trust: customers will appreciate that your brand made additional effort to ensure they have all the information they need.
Offer BOPIS
While your quality visuals and size details can cut down on the vast majority of returns, a final insurance policy against them is offering BOPIS, or Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store. The practice has become a favorite among major retailers like Target and Walmart, and for good reason. Allowing your customers the chance to come into a store and experience the pre-purchased product eliminates lots of potential friction.
Your customer doesn’t have to elbow through other shoppers, wait in a checkout line, and fumble with their wallet to make a purchase. They simply click “buy” from their home, head to the store, examine the product to make sure it’s what they want, and go along their way.
Better still, if there are defects or the product isn’t what they want, they can immediately return or exchange it, rather than waiting for the return to come through the mail. That means that the shopper is happier, you’re less likely to lose the sale, and the environment is taxed just a little less. Over time, the impact can be significant.
How CX can help the planet: Forward to the future
We’re in a time when providing exceptional customer experience isn’t just a strategy, it’s an expectation. But is burning millions of dollars (and millions of tons of CO2) to fix problems really the best customer experience strategy we can come up with?
Just because CX is the latest battlefront in retail, that doesn’t make it a zero-sum game. Retailers don’t need to outcompete each other on unsustainable, costly tactics. By balancing winning loyal customers with preserving our vital resources, retailers can forge a better way for customers, for bottom lines, and for the planet.
What’s promising is that this approach will likely become the standard sooner than you think, due to changing consumer preferences. In a recent survey from the Harris Poll, 82% of shoppers said retailers had a responsibility to reduce returns to lessen their environmental impact. That expectation will likely pressure retailers of the future to tailor their customer experience strategies to be just a little greener, which as it turns out, is helpful to all of us.
