NCR Targets Online Ordering Efficiency

While brick-and-mortar retailers can’t quite recreate the experience of shopping online, by being a little more flexible and open to streamlining certain processes, they can win customers back from their computers.

NCR Corporation, a consumer transaction technology firm, announced Thursday (Oct. 22) that it was launching NCR Power Picking, a new service that will allow brick-and-mortar retailers to optimize their click-and-collect capabilities. Todd Michaud, vice president and general manager of global enterprise, merchandising and supply chain at NCR Corporation, explained in a statement how NCR Power Picking will let even small, resource-strapped merchants perfect click-and-collect processes this coming holiday shopping season.

“While order-online/pick up in-store is convenient for customers, executing on the promise of this shopping model can be challenging for retailers, as the complete ecosystem needed often crosses siloed components of their IT networks and business operations,” Michaud said. “NCR Power Picking helps enable omnicommerce and when deployed with Retail ONE (NCR’s suite of merchant-facing apps), retailers can deliver a seamless click-and-collect solution that improves efficiencies for retailers and shopping experiences for customers.”

NCR’s announcement comes at an opportune time. According to a survey conducted by Postcode Anywhere, 95 percent of U.S. and U.K. consumers plan on buying at least one item online and picking it up in the store this holiday shopping season. While the U.S. still has a ways to go in terms of click-and-collect adoption (only 9 percent of consumers have tried it), the 73 percent of shoppers in the U.K. that have used click-and-collect prove that, with the right optimization tools in place, ordering online and picking up in-store can be a viable method of conducting business on a large scale.

According to Michaud, helping small merchants scale click-and-collect operations is just what NCR Power Picking does. By helping store associates pull more items at once from shelves instead of manually checking retrievals against a list, the software and NCR hope to bring more merchants than ever to the click-and-collect world this season.

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