Delivery at walking speed.

Shipping, minus the shipping

Every pickup order is a parcel you never pay for. Carrier costs run five to ten dollars on a typical domestic shipment, so even a modest pickup share becomes real money by the end of the month — the figure above does that arithmetic at seven dollars an order. The customer, meanwhile, gets the one thing no courier can sell them: the order today. On Shopify the feature is called local pickup — you switch it on per location and checkout offers it to anyone close enough. The quiet upside happens at the counter: a meaningful share of pickup customers add something while they wait — a refill, an accessory, the thing by the till — and that attach purchase lifts UPT without a discount or a campaign. Shipping saved is the headline; the counter is the compounding.

What it takes to run well

Real-time inventory accuracy is the hard requirement, not a nice-to-have. A pickup promise only holds if the SKU the site shows in stock is genuinely on the shelf; sell a phantom unit and you have created an out of stock with an audience — a customer standing in your store, holding a confirmation for a product you cannot hand over. If your counts drift, fix that before you switch pickup on. Second, notify clearly: "ready for pickup" should be an explicit message with a time and a place, not something the customer infers from an order status page. Third, give the handoff a home — a labelled shelf, a named counter, a staff routine — so collection takes a minute, not a search. Run those three well and pickup is the cheapest delivery method you will ever offer.