Since Friday, October 30, an anglicism has been on everyone’s lips when it comes to talking about local commerce, closed because it belongs to the “non-essential” category: “click and collect”. In good French, the withdrawal in store. The Chartres merchants who are obliged, by decree, to keep their curtain drawn, compete in imagination to keep their link with their customers and avoid achieving zero turnover.
By phone, by email, via social networks …
This is how the Vitrines de Chartres have been referencing, since the first confinement, on their website, the member shops that practice “click and contact”. It’s all about giving customers the means to contact their stores. “By phone, by email or via a Facebook page, we indicate the means that the merchant has chosen”, explains Nathalie Casalinho, the downtown developer of Vitrines de Chartres.
A solution adopted by Bruno Martinez, the boss of the very young La Grotte de bricks toy store. Opened in September, the store exclusively offers Lego® and Playmobil® products, two ranges for which the end-of-year holiday season is essential. “I have been registered on the site since this morning (Wednesday November 3, Editor’s note) ! For the moment, I mainly have requests for information, but I hope very slowly to get closer to a turnover more consistent with that which I should have achieved during a year without coronavirus ”, hopes the manager , which does not however have any illusions about the scope of “click and collect”.
Containment: outings, activities, shops, what can or not be done?
Stay open without being
Then it remains for the seller to decide through which means he wishes to allow the customer to recover his goods. In the decoration store Chez Chose, which she took over with her husband last May, Alexia Lefèvre practices what she calls “ask and collect”. “As we are lucky to have a large window, I put as many items as possible in the window. People walk by, stop at the door, which I leave open, ask what they want and leave with it. I installed my cash register at the door, so they don’t come in, ”explains the shopkeeper who therefore chooses to come to her shop on her usual hours, and who works equipped with warm clothes.
A store is proximity and advice, but the Internet will be part of the business of tomorrow
Yannick Barguill (Owner of the Endurance shop)
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A little further, at Endurance shop, Yannick Barguill learned the lessons of the first confinement: “In the first, I really played along, closing completely. But this second wave could really hurt us. So I do click and contact and, to collect the products, customers have three options: pick them up by drive at the store, receive them for delivery, at home or at their workplace, or order on the national website, which I joined during this second confinement. “
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The sporting goods trader, who receives 80% of the transaction carried out on the website, did not make this decision with a good heart. “A store is proximity and advice, but that (Internet, Editor’s note)will be part of the business of tomorrow, ”he believes, a bit fatalistic.
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Same bitter observation for Bruno Martinez. “I opened a neighborhood store for people passing by, contact. Click and contact is a microsolution and it will never be my priority. “
Geraldine Sellès
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