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Light path

Elena Pechnikova, Development Director of Itella in Russia, agrees: the main engine of the "buy and take" formats in Russia remains the desire of buyers to receive goods and services "no worse than in Europe."raquo;. The Russian e-commerce market is actively growing, including due to small towns – according to various data, 48% of new Internet users in the country live in small towns, towns and rural settlements. 50% of respondents said that they would buy online much more often if "Russian Post" or expensive courier delivery services would not be "the only wealth of choice". "However, many retailers live in the illusion that only in large cities there are advanced Internet users," shares Ms. Pechnikova. "In fact, there are such buyers everywhere and, accordingly, the ordered goods must come to a place where they can be picked up."

It is at this stage that the "great geographical discoveries" begin in Russia for retailers and logisticians. "For example, a consumer lives in a small village where access is difficult," continues Elena Pechnikova. And he doesn't want to pay a big price for the goods because of this. There is a conflict between how much this service can cost from the consumer's point of view and how much it will actually cost from the point of view of its logistical implementation. What will be the share of delivery in the cost of the goods? As a result, the market leader remains "Russian Post" and companies that already have either terminals, or delivery centers, or a wide geographical coverage, and they do not need to additionally invest in infrastructure, since they already have it. This is their competitive advantage over companies that are just starting to develop infrastructure from scratch. So, for example, our company, having decided to invest in the development of the delivery direction "by the last mile", did not acquire a fleet for delivery and did not hire couriers, but bought a company "MaximPost", which has experience in this direction".

The concepts of "buy there, pick up here" are already actively influencing at least the segment of warehouses and logistics in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Standard warehouses with high-altitude storage, full pallets, piece pick-up mainly of the lower tiers are not suitable for them. "Click& collect, on the contrary, assume a low room with a huge number of operations that can be performed on the floor, since pre-sale preparation is carried out in the floor area," explains Elena Pechnikova. Depending on how the volume grows, the amount of labor is determined, at what stage automation is required, sorting and packaging centers appear. This is the classic way of companies engaged in piece-by-piece processing of goods.

In the event that click & collect format projects continue their aggressive expansion, market participants predict an increase in interest in warehouses with automatic picking and sorting lines, packaging solutions and automation in general. The altitude will also change, with the exception of high-rise marshalling yards, where the volume of orders is many thousands.

Portrait in the interior

Mikhail Shaposhnikov, Director of the Strategic Consulting Department RealJet, predicts that in the next year and a half, the main customers of the "buy here, take there" formats in Russia will remain customers sensitive to additional costs, preferring this format delivery «to the door ». "Recently, another click & collect format has been developing. If there is no product from the range of the network in a store near the house, the buyer orders it here from another store of the network," Mr. Shaposhnikov shares. On the one hand, this is convenient, on the other, the market is becoming more and more competitive, and consumers today already have the opportunity to find this product in an online store with the possibility of free delivery to the door. The question is, why wait, go somewhere, if you can do with a little blood? In addition, more and more retailers are offering home delivery "free of charge, that is, for free", optimizing costs, reducing logistics costs. Thus, the biggest challenge for the development of the click & collect service will be precisely the competition with the free opportunity of the consumer to get everything at once without getting up from the sofa.

The most popular for the format "buy here, pick up there", according to the interlocutors "MM", will be everyday goods or large household appliances. "Books, electronics (the dimensions and weight of which allow the consumer to independently carry it from the pick-up point to the house), toys," lists Mikhail Shaposhnikov. But retailers of clothing and footwear, I believe, will use click & collect only in the format of transferring individual goods to loyal customers from one end of the city to the other. But not in the format of ordering and pickup, the consumer always needs an assortment, visual representation, no restrictions in the choice, and here, despite the large offer, it is difficult to assess its characteristics and it is impossible to order everything that could be tried on in the shopping gallery of a regional retail center.

The format remains controversial for the owners of the shopping center: pick-up points are still not full-fledged tenants working for the synergy of the entire shopping center, so they are placed either in the dead zones of the object (visitors are targeted, which means they will find it anyway), or they are not placed at all. "If the owner has a choice between a standard retailer and a non-standard pick-up point, he, of course, will not hesitate to choose the first," explains Mikhail Shaposhnikov. But for a shopping center of a district scale or for objects in small cities near Moscow, such as Orekhovo-Zueva, Domodedovo, pick-up points are quite a standard tenant.

At the same time, the concepts of click & collect are already influencing the architecture and interior of shopping centers, believesAlexander Balabin, CEO «Severin Project». "People who are more comfortable shopping online will perceive the interior of an offline store accordingly," explains Mr. Balabin. A comfortable space for fans of e-commerce is characterized by utilitarianism, conciseness, maximum functionality of all elements, an abundance of touchscreens and convenient self-service systems.

The interior of such a store should be simple, but informative, and the navigation intuitive and unobtrusive. As for the layouts, the main principle here is the most open spaces with a minimum of blocking details, which are an annoying factor. Exteriors also play a role in the organization of a sought-after retail space, for example, when we designed the Olympic shopping center in Zvenigorod, we deliberately tried to give the facades a dynamic, concise and slightly futuristic look, with a minimum amount of unnecessary details.

Stanislava Nazhmitdinova, Business Development Director at W&B, agrees: although such technologies are the future of retail, but their speed of distribution and further success more than half depend on how correctly and personified the work will be built. "For retailers in general, the introduction of the service is harder so far, since the service requires perfect configuration of business processes and full synergy with its customer," reports Ms. Nazhmitdinova.

Author: Ekaterina Reutskaya

Photo: Shutterstock.com