Pier 1 Upsells to 50% of Buy Online/Pick Up in Store Shoppers

Approximately 50% of the shoppers using Pier 1 To-Go, the retailer's recently introduced buy online/pick up in-store e-commerce site, add purchases to their market baskets when they come into the brick-and-mortar store to pay for and retrieve their orders.

Pier 1 CEO Alexander Smith gave a status report on the site, which had a soft launch in June and is now fully operational in the U.S and Canada. The site is producing "significantly higher average tickets and units per transaction than the company average," said Smith. "Our stores are interacting extremely well with the customers at the time of order pickup and achieving nice upsell results. About one-half of all the Pier 1 To-Go sales have items in their basket over and above what was reserved online."

Smith added that Pier 1 To-Go sales contributed approximately 1% to the company's Q2 sales. "As we move through the second half of the year, we will start to market Pier 1 To-Go more forcefully, especially around Christmas," Smith said during a recent conference call.

The retailer is moving back into e-commerce step by step after exiting the channel in 2007. "We are on track to launch our new e-commerce enabled site next summer," said Smith. "We have selected a platform which supports multi-channel order management and fulfillment. This aligns with our intention to create a seamless shopping experience for our customers. We don't want online shoppers and store shoppers, we just want shoppers."

Rebuilding Pier 1's e-commerce business is a key focus of the retailer's three-year, $200 million capital expenditure plan, but the retailer is also investing in a number of IT systems. During the first six months of this fiscal year, approximately $8 million of its $21.3 million in capital spending "was directed primarily in technology products and infrastructure, such as pier1.com and e-commerce, improved planning allocations and employment systems, labor scheduling optimization and the replacement of certain legacy systems," said CFO Charles Turner.

For related content: Building E-Commerce a Key Focus of Pier 1's $200M CapEx Investment

Pier 1 Taking Measured Steps Back into Online Sales