“Buy Online, Pick Up in Store” under Fit Uncertainty: To Offer or Not to Offer

Retailers offer BOPS (Buy Online, Pick Up in Store) service to improve consumers shopping experience. However, this greatly increases the decision complexity for retailers and consumers. For consumers, whether to purchase online or from a store with the BOPS service is a complex decision. This is especially true when the product has fit uncertainty. That is, consumers are uncertain about product fitness before using it. Also, their store visit cost can be heterogeneous and follows some distribution function. For a retailer, it needs to jointly optimize multiple decisions including the convenience degree of BOPS. To help the retailer develop the jointly optimal decisions, we first build a mathematical model where the retailer sells the product through online and store channel and analyzes the possible effects of BOPS. We find that the retailer should offer BOPS when the channel cost ratio (ratio of shipment fee divided by average store visit cost) is large enough. Through numerical studies, we show that the ratio of profit offering BOPS divided by the benchmark increases with the probability of product fit, shipment fee, and the convenience degree of BOPS. We then consider the case where the convenience degree of BOPS is also a decision itself. We find the optimal convenience degree of BOPS increases along with the average store visit cost and the probability of product fit. When the cost factor of offering the convenience for BOPS is larger than a threshold, the retailer should never offer BOPS.