Pickup today, or a date at your store

The problem

In 2014, products online said "Store Pickup: Check Stores," and the answer wasn't reliable: the site didn't know whether a unit was actually in a given store. Pickup was free and close, but online it was a guess, and a wrong guess failed in one of two ways:

• The store didn't have it, and ship to store wasn't set up for that product: the order canceled automatically.
• The store didn't have it, and ship to store was set up: the customer got a "delayed" notice with a 5 to 7 day window, and often canceled.

Either way, a customer who chose pickup because it was fast ended up with no product or a week's wait.

What I saw

Pickup wins when the promise is true for one named store.

For many shoppers, the nearest Best Buy is closer than any warehouse. The promise had to be as specific as that store's clock: today, in an hour, or tomorrow.

What I built

• Store inventory in near real time: the site showed pickup only where the store's sellable units said it could, using the inventory service in One answer to "Can I get it?"
• A pickup promise tied to the store's clock: available today, shown before the store opens; pickup today, ready in 1 hour, shown during store hours until 2 hours before close; pickup tomorrow, shown in the last 2 hours before close and after closing.
• Ship to store, set up automatically: ship to store used to be switched on by hand, product by product, which is why some pickup orders canceled outright. I replaced that with a rule: a product can ship to a store whenever the warehouse that replenishes that store has it in stock. The pickup date came from that warehouse's units and its schedule to the store, shown before the order instead of a "delayed" notice after it. If neither the store nor its replenishing warehouse had the unit, pickup wasn't offered at all.
• Open Box for pickup: stores could sell returned units to online shoppers nearby.

The result

• Store pickup grew from under 15% of online sales when I started to 42% by the 2019 holiday quarter, as reported on Best Buy's earnings call. Four pieces of this work helped drive it: near-real-time store availability, pickup times shown before the order, ship to store set up automatically, and Open Box units available for pickup.
• A pickup order could no longer be placed at a store that didn't have the unit. Products the chosen store didn't have were offered as ship to store, with the date shown up front. Both cancellation paths closed before the order was placed.

What I learned

A promise is only as good as its clock. "Ready in 1 hour" works because it disappears 2 hours before close, when the store could no longer keep it.