eBay Australia have announced their first Click and Collect partnership with Woolworths. The trial starts in Sydney and Tasmania with 90 Woolworths and Big W stores and a limited number of professional eBay sellers. More than 40,000 items on eBay Australia are expected to be offered with Click and Collect as a delivery option from today.
It’s a similar “trial” to how the UK kicked off their Click and Collect partnership with Argos in the UK. Buyers will be able to select items from participating sellers and then simply choose their nearest store in the delivery options when they come to pay. This is of course offered as an alternative to traditional delivery to home or work.
In a joint statement eBay Australia and Woolworths said “New research shows that one in five online shoppers in Australia buys online at least once a week, yet almost half are not permitted to receive personal deliveries at work. A quarter have taken holiday or worked from home in order to receive an online delivery. Half re-direct personal online deliveries because they are at work. With this in mind, eBay and Woolworths have developed a service that will provide the most convenient delivery network for online shopping in Australia, giving consumers the chance to choose a collection point that suits their needs“.
Here at Tamebay we love Click and Collect, not because Dan or I use it on a regular basis, although we’ve both been known to opt for it when it’s convenient. We love Click and Collect because a reasonably large proportion of consumers love Click and Collect and anything that greases the wheels of ecommerce is good news.
In the UK Click and Collect has been a roaring success for eBay and well over a million parcels have been collected from Argos stores. If the eBay Australia Woolworths partnership refects the UK experience, it’s going to be massively popular with Australian buyers and we’d expect to see it expand rapidly as 2015 progresses.
2 Responses
When click and collect was first introduced to our listings we got loads, now it is only maybe 1 in 30 orders on Ebay are click and collect.
What I would love to know is, what is in it for Argos ? Do we know that or will the intention be to start charging retailers for the service at some point when they cannot afford not to be part of it.
Click and collect sale ratios will peak before Xmas as buyers will visit bricks and mortar stores anyway to do other shopping. At other times of the year how many buyers will want to make the special trip for collection only?
Who pays for the free returns if items are not collected within 7 days?