18 Oct Amazon and local commerce: Click & Collect arrives in store

• The latest initiative of Jeff Bezos’ company is aimed at small stores that simultaneously sell on the marketplace.
• Customers will be able to come to the store to pick up what they have purchased on Amazon shortly after ordering it.

In recent years, small businesses and traditional shops have been progressively disappearing due to the unstoppable rise of e-commerce and large retail outlets. Many of them, far from closing, have chosen to modernize and gradually adapt to the new paradigm of buying and selling products, turning to platforms such as Amazon to use them as a showcase and thus reach millions of people around the world.

These small local shops and warehouses have many things to offer customers, such as the immediacy of the service or the flexibility of hours for product collections.

For this reason, Amazon has launched a new program called Click & Collect in-store, aimed at making the most of local commerce.

What is Click & Collect?

This is a program that allows sellers who have a physical store to offer customers the ability to buy through Amazon and pick up items in-store on the same day. This way, if you’re one of these sellers, you’ll be able to reach new customers through the marketplace while increasing traffic to your physical store and improving your interaction with the local community.

Click & Collect will be available to customers who live within a maximum radius of 48 km away from your store and will be able to select this option at the time of checkout. They will also receive messages about their status, the pick-up location and the waiting time.

What else do you need to know?

First of all, it’s a completely free service for all parties, whether you’re a seller or a customer. In addition, it is valid for any type of product, so you can take advantage of it regardless of the type of business you have.

On the other hand, if you use a third-party integrator to keep tabs on all your accounts in different marketplaces, you can still participate in the program because the APIs built for Click & Collect are an extension of the selling partner APIs. In fact, the only essential requirement is to correctly abide by performance guidelines, such as the “ready to pick” rate or the “cancel” rate.

Finally, as not all customers have the same facilities to pick up their order, they will have up to 5 days to pick up the product from the moment it was marked as available in store.

With all this, Click & Collect opens Amazon to local stores across the country.