Shop Local

Most retail websites, when they display a product catalogue, it is based on stock in the ‘Web Warehouse’. As most home delivery orders are shipped from the warehouse.

This is their key online ‘product range’.

As product ranges evolve, the retailer’s stores often have stock from previous seasons, which we call ‘tail end stock’. This usually can never be sold ‘online’, as those products are not listed or stocked in the main ‘Web Warehouse’.

Our new Shop Local feature allows customers to shop from the store closest to them. Customers can now switch between shopping the main website, which reflects the stock held in the central warehouse, to shopping the stock in their local store. This is a first for the industry.

When you shop local, you can now see products stocked in the store, including the ‘tail end stock’. Which you can promote or mark as clearance.

So what’s the problem with the status quo? This frustrated M&S customer explains:

‘I was looking for some tracksuit pants during Covid, and I live 15 mins from an M&S store, so thought it would be good to click and collect something.

I went on to the M&S website and found a product. They then allowed me to check if it was stocked in my local store, I entered the postcode, selected my store and it said ‘not in stock’. I then went back to the listing page, found another product I liked, and went through the same store selection process on their ‘PDP’ page, again got the message ‘not in stock’. I tried another 5 products, and all of them were not stocked in my local M&S.

At this point I gave up and went onto Amazon. Why could M&S just not show me online,
ALL the products stocked in my local store. It would have been so easy, I would have picked any trackpants in stock in my local store in my size.’

itim’s shop local solution is designed precisely to solve this problem.

Our new Shop Local feature allows customers to shop from the store closest to them and switch between shopping the main website, which reflects the stock held in the central warehouse, to shopping the stock in their local store, a first for the industry which means you now have a way of clearing ‘online or via mobile’ ‘tail end stock’ in your stores.

With Shop local we guarantee 30 min click and collect and same day despatch from store.

Shop Local - This is a website toggle which allows consumers to shop their local store, only showing available store stock.

Shop Local is already a popular option at Majestic; combined with our sophisticated order routing, we are seeing about 60% of orders going to local stores.