Asda and Walmart rolling out click & collect lockers
Asda is expanding its use of innovative tower lockers for click & collect as customers find them an attractive and convenient alternative to visiting stores when collecting their online orders.
During Retail’s Big Show, organised by the NRF Indrek Oolup,co-founder of Cleveron, which operates the tower lockers that have been adopted by Asda and its parent company Walmart – revealed that demand for the lockers by growing numbers of click & collect customers was leading to their broader roll-out.
Having initially used standard-build lockers Oolup says the tower variety was subsequently developed to minimise the space they required in terms of footprint and also boost their capacity. “We found they were filling up fast and so we wanted to maximise capacity and to not have retailers needing to buy another locker..”
The Tower 401 and larger 402 were created to solve the problem: “We were wasting cubic metres. They have dynamic shelving and sensors that detect products [and their sizes]. We also wanted to make the pick-up seamless and speed up the collection time for customers. There is no waiting – they are simply sent a code on their phone and it’s entered into the tower.”
They are presently located at 110 Walmart stores in the US with an average of 160 lockers at each site. Some locations have 250 lockers. “They are five metres high and can be built-out width ways as they are modular,” says Oolup.
The largest Calderon implementation is at the Zara store in Stratford where there are two towers located with the outlet that have a total capacity of 2,200 parcels.
Oolup points out that some retailers are using the towers to accept returns, which is very much the case in Hungary, Bulgaria and Spain, where the codes can be reused for the return of the item within a 14-day timeframe. Although there is a reluctance from some retailers to so easily accept returns he says they should do so as this “makes the journey as seamless as possible for the customer”.
