Thanks to the increasing popularity of e-Commerce stores, more and more retailers (who are even running physical stores) are making their presence known online. But, only a few online stores are actually taking advantage of the latest and the greatest features on the web to market themselves as a brand. One advantage that retailers with actual physical stores have over standard online businesses is that they can provide different kinds of shipping options to their customers. One of the most commonly used methods is the in-store pickup option.
When a customer is shopping online, there is one thing that makes every customer impatient: shipping. Many times, customers have to wait for several days for the delivery of the item / product. These days, there is one term that is trending in e-Commerce industry at a very fast pace - BOPS. BOPS stands for Buy Online, Pick Up in Store; which offers customers the best of both worlds. They can either wait for the item to be delivered at any shipping address or they can actually go to the store (physical location) and pickup the item / product themselves.
The 'Good News' is that nopCommerce supports "in-store pickup option" and allows store owners (who are also running several offline stores / pickup locations) to offer different shipping options to their customers and online shoppers.
In nopCommerce, a store owner can add multiple pickup points / locations. The customers can pick up their goods from different stores. During the checkout process, if a customer selects pickup in-store, a Google Map can be used indicating the locations of the nearby pickup points.
Today, we will be going over the steps involved in setting up the in-store pickup option (pickup points) on nopCommerce site.
First, you need to make sure that the "Pickup in store" plugin is installed and active on our nopCommerce store site (this plugin comes with nopCommerce out of the box).
Go to Administration section > Configuration > Local Plugins > (look for this the plugin - Pickup in store).
Make sure it is installed and activated
Now, you can either click on the "Configure" button or go to Administration section > Configuration > Shipping > Pickup points.
Click on the "Add a new pickup point" button like this (to add a new location)
After clicking the button, you will get a pop-up window where you can fill out the store's details like this.
After saving your new location, go to Administration section > Configuration > Settings > Shipping settings.
On the Shipping Settings page, enable the following options.
"Pick Up in Store" enabled: CHECK
A value indicating whether "Pick Up in Store" option is enabled during checkout. Please ensure that you have at least one active pickup point provider.
Display pickup points on the map: CHECK
Check to display pickup points on the map.
Google maps API key - Enter the Google API Key here.
Visit the following link for more information - https://developers.google.com/maps/faq
There is one thing that you should keep in mind, that if you have the option "Ship to the same address" enabled, the customer will never get the option to select pickup location because that step will be skipped.
Now, here is what the pickup option looks like on the public store during the checkout process.
- nopCommerce can be downloaded from here.
- nopCommerce version used in this article - Version 3.80
- nopCommerce Support.