Online shopping has become a mainstream part of our life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Retailers have had to act fast to keep up with the demand.
As businesses try to stay open amid COVID-19, safety quickly became a point of contention.
While people who work from home feel relatively safe, people who work in delivery are left exposed. As the latter deliver the goods to the former, they run the risk of getting infected.
Thankfully, one of the delivery options "curbside pickup" offers a middle ground, allowing for both customers and employees to stay safe during COVID-19.
Curbside pickup works a lot like home delivery. Your customers select a list of products they'd like to order, add them to their online shopping cart, then pick the date and time.
The process of order is a bit different than delivery but requires no face-to-face interactions or close proximity to other people:
1. Your customers order online in your store, during checkout they select their wanted date and time, and select the curbside pickup shipping method and they do the payment online.
2. You will prepare the items before they come on the scheduled time.
3. Your customers pull up their car to near the selected store.
4. You will bring their ordered items and load them into customers car.
5. You then mark the order as processed.
That's it!
Now you may wonder how to set up this in your VPCart.
Well, this is not a new system to support
curbside pickup, so VPCart merchants should find this very easy to set up. Any VPCart versions should be able to support this (except the LITE version which is very limited).
1) You will need to add a new record in your Shipping administration for the curbside pickup.
To do this, login to your VPCart administration and go to: Advanced Settings > Shipping & Handling.
2)
Click Add a Record button.
3)
Fill in the fields below:
: Curbside Pickup (see Contact Us page for location)
Shipping Cost : 0
4) Click Add a Record button.
NOTE: If you have more than one Curbside Pickup location, you can add more shipping records for each location.
5)
You will need to enable config below to allow your customers to pickup a date and time when they can go for the pickup.
xdeliverydate: Yes
xdeliverytime: Yes
To do this, please go to your admin menu: Advanced Settings > Software Configurations.
6) In the right text box, enter:
xdeliverydate and click search icon.
7) Set the value to Yes from the dropdowns.
8) Click Continue button.
9) Repeat step 6 until step 8 for the other config
xdeliverytime (set to Yes).
You are done.
Now, the process of the ordering would be same like usual.
Your customers will do the checkout like usual, they will select the "Curbside Pickup (see Contact Us page for location)" from the shipping dropdowns, leave the shipping address etc.. and enter the Delivery Date and Develiry Time etc.. and do the online payment.
You as the merchant will get their order once they have paid and start preparing their items and be ready for their selected delivery date and time.
When they have come to your store on the scheduled date, you will put the items on their vehicles, and you will need to mark their order as processed.
To mark their orders as processed, please follow the steps below:
1) Go to your VPCart admin: Store > Orders
2) In the order list, select the order you want, and locate the column "processed", from the dropdowns, select "process".
3) Click the Submit button near the bottom.
If you have any questions with this, you can submit a helpdesk ticket to us at:
https://helpdesk.vpcart.com
Thank you