Setting up click and collect as a retailer: how it works

Click and collect means a customer orders online and comes to pick up the goods themselves at your shop or warehouse. For the customer, it’s free and fast. For you as a retailer, it’s mainly a matter of order tracking: you need to know at all times what’s been sold, what’s ready, and who’s coming to collect it. Anyone offering click and collect without that foundation in place ends up selling faster than they can keep up with.

In this article, you’ll read what the flow looks like in practice, where things typically go wrong, and what software you need to keep it manageable.

What exactly is click and collect?

Click and collect is a pickup format where the ordering moment happens online and the delivery moment happens in your shop. There are three common variants.

Pay and collect. The customer pays online immediately and picks up the parcel later. This is the most widely used form, because payment is already in before you start picking.

Reserve and collect. The customer sets an item aside and only pays at the till. Handy for products you want to try on or view first, such as clothing or furniture.

Curbside pickup. The customer stays parked outside and you bring the order to the car. In Belgium and the Netherlands, you see this mainly for groceries and bulky goods.

Which variant you choose partly determines how you set up your tracking. With reservations, payment only happens at the end, so your stock stays blocked for longer.

Why retailers offer click and collect

The reason is rarely just customer-friendliness. There are three hard arguments behind it.

You save on shipping costs. For small orders, the parcel price eats up a large part of your margin. With pickup, that cost simply disappears.

You get the customer back through the door. Someone coming to collect an item often buys something extra. Retailers consistently report positive figures on this, though it varies strongly by sector.

You shorten delivery time. What’s on your shelf this afternoon can be with the customer this evening. No courier can match that.

The Belgian e-commerce landscape keeps growing strongly. Belgians spent around €18.3 billion on online purchases in 2025, a rise of 5.4% compared to 2024. Clothing and footwear form the largest category (€2.7 billion), followed by electronics (€1.7 billion). These are all products that genuinely need to reach the customer, which means just as many moments where your delivery makes the difference.

The flow: from online order to in-store pickup

This is the heart of the matter. A click and collect order goes through four steps, and at every step your system can let you down.

Step 1: the customer orders online. Your webshop shows a pickup option and a choice of locations. Important: the webshop needs to know what’s in that specific shop, not just your total stock.

Step 2: the order lands in your central system. Not in a separate mailbox or a standalone overview per channel, but in the same list as your other orders. That way your warehouse immediately sees what needs to be done.

Step 3: the warehouse or shop processes the order. Someone picks the items, scans them and sets them aside with the order name on them. At that point, the stock moves definitively from available to reserved.

Step 4: the customer collects. Staff look up the order by name or order number, hand it over, and the system books the sale. The invoice or till receipt follows after that.

That chain lives or dies by the connection between your webshop and your stock. You can read how to set up that connection in practice in our article on connecting a webshop to stock management.

Four pitfalls you need to solve up front

Double-sold stock. The last unit sells online while a customer is paying for it in the shop. Without real-time stock between till and webshop, this is guaranteed to happen.

The customer shows up for nothing. Someone stops by, but the order hasn’t been picked yet. This happens when orders come in by email and no one tracks them systematically.

No status tracking. The customer doesn’t know whether they can come yet. An automatic notification at the “ready for pickup” status solves that, but that status needs to exist somewhere first.

In-store return of an online order. A customer brings back a parcel ordered through the webshop. If your till operates separately from your webshop, your staff can’t process that return correctly.

Setting up click and collect in six steps

1. Map your stock per location. You need to know what’s where, not just how much you have in total.
2. Connect your webshop to one central stock. Shopify, WooCommerce or another platform: every sale needs to adjust the same stock.
3. Set up the pickup option in your webshop. Clearly state the location, opening hours and expected ready time.
4. Agree on a picking moment. For example, two fixed rounds per day. That way your team knows when it needs to happen.
5. Set up status notifications. The customer gets a message as soon as the order is ready, not before.
6. Provide a physical pickup spot. A shelf with order numbers behind the till is enough for most shops.

Start small. One shop, one fixed picking round per day, and only expand once the flow is running smoothly.

What software do you need for click and collect?

You need three building blocks, and they need to talk to each other.

A webshop that supports pickup points and location-based stock. Both Shopify and WooCommerce can do this, although with WooCommerce it often requires an extra plugin. Thuiswinkel.org published a practical starter guide on this.

A till system that uses the same stock as your webshop. If your till and webshop work with separate counts, you’ll keep having to correct discrepancies. Read more about this on our page about a till system with stock management.

A central order layer where all orders come together, regardless of the channel. That’s exactly where Deskflow fits in: one place where your webshop orders, in-store sales and pickups sit side by side, backed by the same single stock truth. That way, no one needs to switch between three screens to know whether an order is ready.

Want the bigger picture first? Then read our article on omnichannel retail, where we explain how shop and webshop connect.

Frequently asked questions

What is click and collect?

Click and collect is a pickup format where a customer orders online and collects the goods themselves at the seller’s shop or warehouse. The customer pays no shipping costs and usually gets their order faster than with home delivery.

How much does it cost to set up click and collect?

The biggest cost isn’t the pickup counter, it’s the connection between webshop, till and stock. Anyone who already has those systems connected can usually activate click and collect within a few days. Anyone starting from separate systems should plan for a few weeks.

Does click and collect work with Shopify or WooCommerce?

Yes. Both platforms support a pickup option at checkout. The practical challenge lies in stock per shop location, and in bringing all orders together in one tracking system.

How do I avoid selling an item twice?

By having your till and webshop work off the same stock, instead of a sync that runs every so many minutes. As soon as an item is reserved for pickup, it disappears from the stock available online.

Can a customer return an online order to the shop?

Yes, provided your till can look up the webshop order. Without that connection, your staff have to register the return manually, with a risk of errors in your stock and your accounting.

Next step

Not sure whether your current systems can handle click and collect? We’ll go through your webshop, till and stock together, and show you concretely what the order flow would look like.