Click and Collect: How It Works + Examples (2026)

Click and collect turns an online order into an in-store visit by letting shoppers buy online and pick up their purchase at a physical location. Shoppers avoid waiting for delivery, while retailers get another chance to connect with them in person.

The impact extends beyond the store. The World Economic Forum found that delivery vehicles could add five minutes to the average urban commute and account for 13% of city carbon emissions by 2030. Offering in-person pickup can reduce the number of delivery vans on the road, especially in major cities.

This guide covers how click and collect works, how to set it up in Shopify, and where pickup is headed next.

What is click and collect?

Click and collect is a fulfillment method that lets shoppers place an order online and pick it up at a physical location instead of waiting for it to ship. It uses the brick-and-mortar stores in a retailer’s existing network as final stops for orders. Customers get their purchase inside the store, or from a locker or curbside bay outside the store, rather than waiting for a delivery carrier.

With this method, shoppers can avoid shipping fees, eliminate delivery wait times, and pick up their order on their own schedule. Retailers can turn online orders into store visits and cut last-mile delivery out of the process.

Shopify lets retailers set up pickup in-store in the Shopify admin. Retailers can activate pickup by location and send ready-for-pickup notifications from the order workflow, giving customers another way to receive their purchases.

How does click and collect work?

Click and collect works similarly across most retailers, whether the order is picked up at a counter, a locker, or curbside:

1. The shopper selects pickup at checkout and chooses a location.
2. The retailer prepares the order, transferring stock from another location first if needed.
3. The retailer marks the order ready, and the shopper gets a notification.
4. The shopper arrives, confirms their identity or order code, and collects the item.

Click and collect, BOPIS, curbside pickup, and pickup points

Click and collect, buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), curbside pickup, and pickup points are related terms that each describe different aspects of the same or similar fulfillment methods. Here’s how the terms differ..

Why shoppers and retailers use click and collect

Click and collect can benefit both sides: Shoppers get a faster, cheaper way to receive their orders, while retailers can lower fulfillment costs and bring online shoppers to their stores.

Here are more reasons shoppers and retailers use click and collect.

Speed and convenience increase return on investment (ROI)

Extra costs like shipping fees cause 40% of consumers to abandon online shopping carts, while slow delivery times cause 20% to abandon them. Click and collect eliminates shipping fees and gives shoppers more control over when they get their orders.

Retailers get a return on that convenience too. When a shopper comes into the store to pick up their purchase, they’re walking by additional inventory that may catch their eye, potentially increasing their order value.

Reduced last-mile cost and theft risk

Last-mile delivery costs made up 53% of total shipping costs in 2023, up from 41% in 2018. Every order a shopper picks up in person is one a retailer doesn’t have to ship, lowering costs.

Click and collect also reduces the risk of porch piracy. One in four US shoppers, or 64 million people, have had at least one package stolen from their doorstep. Keeping an order inside the store until the shopper arrives lowers the risk of theft, while also reducing one of the potential ecommerce fraud issues a business has to plan for.

Click and collect vs. local delivery

Local delivery is another option for customers who live near one of your stores. The retailer fulfills the order from store inventory and delivers it to the customer, often with same-day or next-day delivery.

It’s an alternative to click and collect when the shopper doesn’t have time to leave home and pick up the product. Grocery is one industry where local delivery works well. US eGrocery sales hit $12.3 billion in November 2025, up 29% year over year, with pickup average order value (AOV) up 11% and delivery average order value up 8% over the same month a year earlier.

Click and collect and local delivery serve different needs:

• Pickup removes the last-mile cost for businesses and consumers. Retailers fulfill from store inventory and hand orders off in person, with no fuel surcharges or driver payouts, and shoppers avoid a shipping fee.
• Local delivery works well when speed matters more than cost. A shopper with no time to leave the house may pay a delivery fee rather than lose the time it takes to drive, park, and wait in line.

Offering both gives shoppers a choice: Pickup removes last-mile delivery costs and brings shoppers into the store, while local delivery serves those who can’t make the trip.

Operational checklist for setting up click and collect in Shopify

Before configuring anything, confirm your business has what click and collect requires:

• At least one location that can fulfill online orders: Pickup in-store needs a physical location set up in the Shopify admin.
• The latest checkout version activated: Most stores already have it. Plus stores need to be migrated to Shopify Extensions.
• Accurate, location-level inventory: Pickup only works if the admin knows what’s on the shelf at each location.
• A staff workflow for marking orders ready and handing them off: The technical setup is easy, but the staff process is what shoppers experience.

Now use this checklist to get your click-and-collect process up and running.

Configure pickup in-store in your admin

To set up pickup in Shopify:

1. Go to Settings > Shipping and delivery.
2. In Additional delivery methods, select Pickup in store.
3. Choose the location where shoppers can pick up orders.
4. Set a processing time for pickup orders.
5. Customize the “ready for pickup” notification.
6. Preview the checkout experience.
7. Select Save.

Once it’s live, confirm the setup works before rolling it out:

• Place a test order and walk it through the full flow, from checkout to the “ready for pickup” notification to marking it as picked up.
• Check that the pickup location’s address, hours, and instructions display correctly at checkout.
• Confirm store transfers trigger correctly for an item not in stock at the pickup location.
• Have a staff member who wasn’t involved in the setup run through the fulfillment steps to catch anything unclear.

For location activation, store transfers, and custom-app setups on Plus, follow Shopify’s full pickup in-store guide.

Inventory visibility and stock buffers

Click-and-collect availability relies on having product in stock. If your website says a customer can pick an item up at one location, but it isn’t available when they arrive, they may lose trust in that pickup.

Shopify tracks inventory separately for each location, so accuracy depends on how well each location’s counts are maintained.

Use these strategies to help:

• Enable multi-location inventory. Each pickup location displays its own on-hand units, so a sale at one store doesn’t oversell stock at another.
• Use store transfers for out-of-stock items. Choose backup locations that can send inventory to the pickup location automatically, and set a longer processing time (for example, “Ready in 2 to 4 days”) when a transfer is required.
• Exclude bulky or restricted items from transfers. Set up transfer exclusions for products that can’t move between locations, so Shopify never promises pickup on something that can’t get there.
• Hold a safety buffer on fast-moving items. Keeping safety stock on hand helps reduce the risk of selling out. Use one of six ways to calculate how much safety stock your store should keep on hand.
• Review the “Days of inventory remaining” report weekly and create manual transfers ahead of known demand spikes.

Staff workflow and point-of-sale (POS) handoff

The technical setup is the easy part. You also need to train your staff on the workflow, so the pickup process feels reliable to shoppers.

In the Shopify admin, staff mark an order Ready for pickup, which triggers a notification to the shopper, and then mark it Picked up once the shopper collects it, which sends a confirmation. 

Staff can also create pickup orders directly in Shopify POS, which helps with made-to-order or customized items sold in person but collected later. The Shop app also provides QR codes so staff can scan a code in the POS to retrieve an order instead of searching for it manually.

Shopify Flow handles the coordination between those steps. Retailers can build workflows to:

• Tag or notify staff automatically when an order comes in marked for pickup
• Alert staff when a pickup order needs to move from “ready” to the front counter for handoff
• Adjust inventory automatically once a pickup order is fulfilled
• Send shoppers status updates and pickup instructions without a staff member sending them manually

Build these using triggers, conditions, and actions in Shopify Flow. For a starting point, see Shopify Flow examples and templates.

Parking bay and signage best practices

For curbside pickup, the parking lot is the shopper’s first physical touchpoint with your brand. Shoppers who have to circle the lot or guess where to park face extra friction before they even collect their order.

Use these tips to make parking easier to navigate:

• Reserve angled, numbered bays near the pickup door. One double-sided sign can cover two bays, and staff walk a shorter distance per order.
• Use high-contrast signage with a single instruction, like “Text ‘Bay 3’ to [number].”
• Set up geofenced arrival alerts so staff see a shopper approaching before they park and can stage the order by the time they arrive.

Measuring click-and-collect performance

Shopify provides order-level data by default, but these key performance indicators (KPIs) can help retailers measure pickup performance.

Average pickup time

How long a shopper waits between arriving and receiving their order reflects both the customer experience and the efficiency of the pickup process. Track average pickup time to see how long customers wait to receive their purchases.

Measure customer arrival consistently using a single method, whether that’s a geofenced alert, an “I’m here” button in the confirmation email, or a QR or order-code scan at pickup. Mixing detection methods across locations makes the KPI difficult to compare month over month.

Reasonable targets are:

• Delight zone: Under 2 minutes
• Acceptable: Under 4 minutes

Log the arrival event and the “picked up” fulfillment event in a custom report to see how many orders fall outside the acceptable range, and which locations or times of day drive that.

Pickup readiness

Pickup readiness measures how often an order is ready by the promised time. Compare the processing time quoted at checkout with when staff mark the order ready for pickup. 

A location that misses its own quoted window needs either a longer processing time at checkout or an internal fix. Repeatedly missing quoted readiness times can erode customer trust in store pickup.

Pickup completion and cancellation rates

Not every pickup order gets collected. Track the share of orders marked ready that are picked up within a set window (for example, 48 hours) against the share that get canceled or refunded because the shopper never showed up. 

A rising cancellation rate can point to unclear pickup instructions, a location that’s hard to find, or inaccurate processing times.

Store transfer lead time

Retailers using store transfers to fill pickup orders from other locations need to track the time between when a transfer is triggered and when the item arrives at the pickup location. This is separate from average pickup time, since a slow transfer delays the “ready for pickup” notification itself rather than the shopper’s wait once they arrive. 

If transfer lead times run longer than the processing time quoted at checkout, either the quoted window needs adjusting or the source locations for that transfer route need to be audited.

Attach rate and incremental revenue

Click and collect can create opportunities for in-store upsells. When a shopper arrives to collect an order, they’re standing in the store, giving retailers an opportunity to sell something they didn’t order. 

The average upsell conversion rate for physical goods is 18.7%, with the top quartile seeing conversion rates around 29.4%.

To improve your attach rate:

• Place eye-catching, low-priced impulse items within reach of the pickup counter.
• Add a one-line upsell to the “ready for pickup” notification, such as an offer to add gift wrapping when they arrive.
• Run a pickup-only discount code and track redemption to isolate the incremental sales it drives.

Industry examples and case studies

Retailers across grocery and specialty retail use in-store pickup, with examples showing how it can contribute to ecommerce and store sales.

Grocery

Grocers around the world are using click-and-collect tactics to improve profitability. 

For example, Kroger’s ecommerce sales, led by their delivery and pickup network, grew 19% year over year (adjusted) in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, according to the company’s earnings report. That improvement in ecommerce profitability helped offset pressures on the company that affected its overall year over year profit margin growth.

Albertsons, which operates “DriveUp & Go” curbside pickup alongside home delivery, reported a similar milestone: Their digital operations turned profitable for the first time in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, even as digital sales growth slowed to 13% year over year. CEO Susan Morris attributed the profitability milestone to higher order density and improved fulfillment operations.

Specialty retail

Pickup isn’t limited to grocery. Home goods brand Parachute returned to Shopify’s unified platform in 2024 after several years on a custom headless setup, and pickup took off after the move: BOPIS generated 1,300 orders in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, representing 35% of the brand’s annual BOPIS volume and 48% of their annual BOPIS revenue. 

SVP of operations Meg Marsh says, “Being able to leverage Shopify's buy online, pick up in store feature actually allows us to tell our online customers that we even have stores. This allows us to drive traffic to the stores where we know that customers have a really great experience.”

Bentley, a Canadian luggage and travel accessories retailer with more than 125 locations, launched BOPIS and ship-from-store as part of a broader move to Shopify Plus and real-time inventory visibility across their full store network. In the year following the transition, Bentley saw 129% year-over-year growth in total revenue, a 74% increase in online sales, and 17% growth in point-of-sale transactions.

Advanced pickup models and trends

Pickup is expanding beyond the staffed in-store counter as retailers add lockers, pickup points, and automated kiosks.

Smart lockers and pickup points

Locker networks are expanding. InPost, Europe’s largest parcel locker operator, now runs more than 40,000 automated parcel machines and almost 33,000 additional pickup points across nine European countries.

Pickup and drop-off (PUDO) networks like parcel lockers are an alternative to home delivery that can improve first-time delivery success. By cutting down on delivery attempts, pickup points can reduce the number of delivery trips by up to 15% and congestion by up to 2%.

Sustainability pressure

If no changes are made to current shipping and delivery practices, carbon emissions from urban delivery traffic could rise 60% by 2030 alongside increased congestion in dense cities. 

More than 70% of shoppers say they value sustainable delivery options, though most aren’t willing to pay extra for them. Pickup and locker networks give retailers a way to offer a lower-emission option without asking shoppers to compromise on cost.

Automated pickup kiosks

Kmart Australia introduced a robotic pickup kiosk in 2023, where shoppers could place an order online, enter their order code at the kiosk in store, and a robotic arm would retrieve and deliver the item to a collection tray. The format was covered by media publications that described customers as “obsessed” with this method.

Zara began rolling out robotic parcel lockers for click and collect in early 2025, built on Cleveron’s automated locker technology. Shoppers scan a code and have their package in hand in under 10 seconds, with no queue or staff interaction required, and the lockers are accessible around the clock. 

The format builds on Cleveron’s earlier robotic pickup kiosks, which retrieve and deliver an order to a collection point after a shopper enters a code, a design already in use at grocers including Albertsons.