eBay starts Click & Collect service in the UK

eBay wants to gain more ground in the offline retail business as its new initiative Click & Collect will give customers the ability to pick up their products in store. Argos, the largest general-goods retailer in the UK, is supporting this new service from the start.

With the new service smaller merchants are also able to specify an Argos store as a pick-up location for their customers. To us that sounds like a deal the smaller retailers, Argos and eBay could profit of. For almost a year eBay has been working on Click & Collect and it now chose the UK as the country to first experiment with this service. eBay president Devin Wenig told TechCrunch that it chose the YK because early trials showed them that UK shopers are the most receptive, with 40% opting for in-store pickups when they were offered (compared to just 7-8% of US consumers).

Click & Collect could be seen as eBay’s answer to Amazon Lockers, a service which caused some friction last week, when partners Staples and RadioShack decided to not longer have Amazon lockers in their stores. But eBay’s service will also compete with the Google-acquired Bufferbox, which is active at a few locations near Toronto.

Launch eBay Now in Europe
eBay also announced today it will launch its one-hour delivery service eBay Now in London next year. The capital city of England will be the first non-US city where eBay Now is launched. When a store is offering the eBay Now service, customers can have their goods delivered to a nearby location in about an hour. In the US, there’s a 5 dollar charge per order and a $25 minimum spend, it’s unknown at the moment how much English customers would have to pay for this service.