Co-op food stores in three UK cities will now support John Lewis click and collect services.
The trial service will be available in six Co-op stores, two in Manchester, one in Nottingham and three in London. The stores will also accept returns.
The department store wants to give customers access to its next-day click and collect service in areas where it doesn’t have stores. John Lewis has 51 stores across the UK, usually located on major high streets. The Co-op on the other hand has over 2500, often located in more residential areas.
John Lewis may roll out the fulfilment option more widely if the trial is successful.
Eva Cullen, partner and head of customer fulfilment operations for John Lewis, said: “Our click-and-collect service is growing in popularity every year as our customers benefit from the ease of being able to pick up their order at a time and place which is convenient to them.”
Mark Pettigrew, the Co-op Group’s director of innovation and format, said: “It is all about creating ease, convenience and choice for today’s time-pressed shopper.
“This is an exciting development, innovations and new technologies are driving a number of initiatives and creating value in our communities through increased offers and services for our members and customers.”
John Lewis’s director of operations Berangere Michel recently said that she believed partnerships would be key to ensuring retailers can deliver on customer expectations for fulfilment.
“We as retailers need to think more cleverly about partnerships.”
She suggested retailers should consider sharing warehouses and transport during the parts of the year when things are quieter.
Another example of this is John Lewis’s joint venture with Clipper, she said, called Click Link. This takes all click and collect orders to Waitrose. John Lewis offers this to 10 to 15 smaller retailers. These retailers can get a John Lewis standard click and collect service while John Lewis can share its overheads.
