Argos is taking advantage of its new association with Sainsbury’s after the 2016 £1.4 billion deal to acquire it and Habitat owner the Home Retail Group.
Argos obviously already has strong Click & Collect importance for marketplace sellers. eBay has a deal that allows sellers to send shoppers their purchases on a click and collect basis at any one of the hundreds of Argos locations around the UK. It makes sense for Argos and Sainsbury’s to take advantage of their new relationship and expand the footprint.
Mike Coupe, Sainsbury’s CEO says: “Customers are demanding more and more flexibility and more speed in terms of the way they shop with us. We would argue very strongly that with the 2,000 points of presence, the great Argos digital capability and the supply chain that backs that up – and the fact that those businesses have access to 27 million customers a week – it gives us a reasonably powerful combination to compete in future. But I don’t pretend for a moment that Amazon and others aren’t going to be significant competitors.”
The key question here is the extent to which Argos and Sainsbury’s will combine to make click & collect a normal service across the board. 150 stores is a quite modest target and trial as it stands and there is much greater potential.
The holy grail here has to be an opportunity for eBay sellers to despatch their goods for click & collect to every single Sainsbury’s branch in the country. According to wikipedia, that’s a total of 1,415 sites across the the UK. And that’s on top of the Argos locations: apparently 845.
Supermarkets are essentially logistics firms that are adept at transporting and sending to, and then selling, a great many goods at multiple locations. That makes them useful partners for ecommerce sellers. The ecommerce opportunity is to enable sellers to plug into that network cheaply and easily. The eBay/Argos partnership was a good start there and Sainsbury’s offers more opportunities. It will be interesting to see where this development is heading in the months to come.
