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How to Set Up Curbside Pickup

Before March, “curbside pickup” wasn’t in our vocabulary. Things have drastically changed and now consumers are expecting flexible shopping options from all businesses. Even as restrictions are lifted and more stores are allowed to open, customers will continue to demand curbside pickup for its convenience and contactless health benefits.

Curbside Pickup in Shopify
Shortly after businesses around the country were ordered to close, Shopify activated a Local Pickup option. When turned on, this option allows customers to choose curbside pickup when checking out at no additional cost.

However, in order to effectively manage order fulfillment, businesses need the ability to limit curbside pickup slots. Only allowing a certain number of orders per timeframe means companies can spread out appointments and ensure staff are not flooded with more requests than they can handle.

While Shopify has recently added Local Pickup to its platform,
it has not provided a way to limit pickup slots.

Limitations of Shopify
Currently, all you’re able to do is select the expected time the order will be ready when first setting up Local Pickup.

Once set, this time frame is displayed to all customers at checkout, regardless of how many orders go through. If you choose Ready for pickup in 1 hour, then become overrun with orders, there is no easy way to push out pickup times or even notify customers of the delay.

Shopify has not made any announcement that limiting pickup slots will be
available natively on their platform.

Adding Pickup Slots with a Shopify App
While a few Shopify Apps have tried to address the gap, none have been completely successful. Some offer the ability to limit pickup slots, but curbside pickup cannot be customized independently of delivery options. Others offer a booking calendar with a date and time picker, but do not allow setting limits on the number of slots per timeframe.

In sum, Local Pickup is a curbside pickup option for only the most basic businesses. It is problematic for most operations because Shopify doesn’t allow a limit to the number of pick up slots per hour and doesn’t address multi-location businesses very well at all.

An Affordable Integrated Curbside Pickup Solution
Your website is most likely a WordPress site. A better solution is to move away from the limitations of Shopify to an integrated eCommerce solution through WordPress. You can sell products online for curbside pickup or delivery, create scheduled appointments for in-store shopping, or develop any other custom buying option you need.

While WordPress is not a plug-and-play solution, we seamlessly integrate curbside pickup into your site and implement other time-saving features that will help with the logistics of scheduling pick-ups such as sending out email reminders or even integrating into your current POS system for inventory management.

With our decades of experience in retail, conversion analysis and eCommerce development and management, idig Marketing is uniquely qualified to build, maintain & optimize your business’ online store.

We build online solutions using all the leading eCommerce CMS platforms and choose the right software for your specific needs and requirements.

If you have any questions or want to learn more about getting your business online,
don’t hesitate to contact us.

idig Marketing is a full-service digital agency that generates meaningful website traffic and drives high value leads to your organization. By optimizing organic content with paid advertising our custom methodology includes hosting, eCommerce and online security.

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