Not everyone on this list is a major ecommerce player, nor are they all in the top 10 for general retail (although Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and The Home Depot are). But these seven companies have been among the most successful at leveraging the 2020 spike in interest in click and collect.
Together, these retailers’ click-and-collect sales grew by 128.4% year over year (YoY) in 2020. Many of them spent the year announcing a litany of unbelievable digital performance metrics.
In Q2 2020, Target reported a ridiculous 734% increase in “Drive Up” sales, and that figure held steady with 500% YoY growth in the following quarter. Target’s in-store click and collect—the more mature of its two pickup options—also boomed by more than 60% in Q2 2020 and by more than 50% in Q3, despite the massive shift to curbside service. Momentum accelerated as consumers got used to these options. In a March 2021 earnings call, Target reported that Drive Up sales had increased by more than 600%, and in-store pickup had increased by more than 70% for full-year 2020.
The Home Depot provided another window into shifting ecommerce trends when it reported that more than 60% of its digital sales involved in-store pickup in both Q2 and Q3 2020. Lowe’s reported a nearly identical ratio for delivery versus in-store pickups for the year, along with YoY ecommerce sales growth of 111% in 2020. Best Buy also recently reported that 48% of its online sales were picked up at a brick-and-mortar location in 2020.
Collectively, these data points paint a revealing picture. For these major retailers, click and collect represented well over a third of all their ecommerce sales. Among the “Big Five” click-and-collect retailers (a list that excludes Macy’s and Nordstrom), customer pickups accounted for 41.9% of their ecommerce sales and more than half (50.2%) of their ecommerce growth last year.