Click-and-Collect Economics: Target, Walmart, Best Buy

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If I had to pick one capability a mid-market commerce brand could add this quarter and still be feeling the margin twelve months later, it would not be a new storefront theme or an AI assistant on the product page. It would be a working click-and-collect flow. Not a buried radio button on the shipping screen, a flow: inventory accurate to a single unit, a pickup promise the store manager can keep, and a mobile checkout that treats collection as the default rather than an exception.

The reason I keep coming back to it is that the arithmetic is public and the arithmetic is one-sided. In the United States, click-and-collect purchases are forecast to make up roughly 10.5% of all ecommerce sales in 2025, on $154.3 billion of retail turnover, according to Statista’s Click and Collect market study. The three retailers I want to put side by side today are not using it to look modern. They are using it because a store-fulfilled order carries different unit economics from a courier-fulfilled one, and the gap compounds every quarter.

Target, Walmart and Best Buy have each published, inside their own fiscal 2025 reporting, the figures that make the case. Target now sees two-thirds of its ecommerce revenue flow through same-day services. Walmart grew its US ecommerce 20% in a single quarter on the strength of store-fulfilled pickup and delivery. Best Buy pulls 45% of its online revenue through in-store pickup. Three different categories, three different store footprints, one recurring argument: the physical store is not a cost centre dragging on the digital business, it is the fulfilment grid the digital business runs on.

What follows is each of the three with the figures they put on the record, and then the question a commerce director reading this actually has: what does it take to build this inside a WooCommerce estate.

Target Turned Three Same-Day Lanes Into Two-Thirds of Its Digital Business

Target’s position before the rebuild is worth remembering. In 2017 the company’s digital business was growing in low double digits off a small base, and pure-play ecommerce was eating category share. The move was not to compete with the pure-plays on their terrain. It was to turn the 2,000 stores Target already runs into the fulfilment network, with three distinct lanes rather than one: Order Pickup inside the store, Drive Up for curbside, and Shipt (now packaged as Target Circle 360) for same-day delivery.

The reason three lanes matter rather than one is that they map to three different purchase occasions. A planned grocery shop goes to Drive Up. An impulse electronics or beauty item goes to Order Pickup on the way home. A time-pressed replenishment goes to same-day delivery via a membership that absorbs the per-order fee. One single collection flow would have captured one of those occasions and missed the other two.

The figures Target reported for fiscal 2025:

• Same-day services generated more than $14 billion in sales, accounting for roughly two-thirds of Target’s total ecommerce revenue, per Target’s fiscal 2025 Q4 commentary covered by Digital Commerce 360 (Abbas Haleem, 4 March 2026).
• Same-day deliveries grew more than 30% in fiscal 2025, with the Target Circle 360 membership base doubling over the year.
• Target Circle 360 same-day delivery alone grew more than 25% in Q4 fiscal 2024 year on year, and digital comparable sales grew 8.7% in the same quarter, per Target’s own Q4 earnings release (4 March 2025).

The transferable lesson is uncomfortable for a brand with one store or none. Same-day fulfilment is not a product you can buy once; it is three parallel flows that cover different needs, and the retailer that offers only one of them is competing on a narrower front than Target. For a mid-market merchant, the honest translation is not “add Drive Up” but “pick the one same-day lane your category actually wants and build it to a professional standard, then revisit whether a second lane is worth the ops cost”.

Walmart Treats 4,600 Stores as the Delivery Grid, Not Inventory Holding Tanks

Walmart’s problem in 2016 and 2017 was simpler to describe than to solve. Amazon was running ground-shipping economics the company could not match from distribution centres alone, and Walmart’s 4,600 US stores sat on the balance sheet as a drag on the digital investor story. The decision that unlocked the current numbers was to stop treating stores as a problem to be reconciled with ecommerce and start treating them as the ecommerce network itself: every store a dark store, every store a last-mile hub, picking and delivering online orders from the same shelf that stocks walk-in trade.

What makes it work operationally is less visible than the Drive Up canopies. It is the stock accuracy regime that lets the website promise an item at a specific store at a specific time, and the labour model that assigns in-store pickers against a predictable queue. Both are capabilities a mid-market brand can buy, but they are capabilities, not features.

Walmart’s fiscal 2025 figures, from the Q4 earnings release dated 20 February 2025:

• Global ecommerce grew 16% in Q4, “led by store-fulfilled pickup and delivery”.
• Walmart US ecommerce comparable sales grew 20% in the quarter.
• Same-day delivery coverage reached 93% of US households by end of fiscal 2025.
• Walmart delivered approximately 2.3 billion items via same-day or next-day service across the full fiscal year.

The transferable lesson here is the one most mid-market operators skip. The store catchment becomes an asset the moment the stock number next to a product is accurate at the level of a single unit. Until it is, every pickup promise is a bet the store manager will quietly honour by walking an identical item out of the back room. Scale that bet to a few hundred orders a week and it collapses on a Saturday. Walmart’s story is not a story about canopies; it is a story about an inventory system that could withstand being promised against.

Best Buy Turned Store Pickup Into Nearly Half of Online Revenue

Best Buy’s position in 2010 was the one everyone wrote the obituary for. Expensive, considered-purchase electronics in a world where Amazon’s prices were visible on the aisle. The company’s answer was not to match Amazon on price for every SKU, which would have ended the business, but to lean into the thing Amazon structurally could not do without buying a nationwide store estate: let the customer have the item in hand within thirty minutes of clicking buy.

The product design argument is worth stating out loud, because it is the piece that most WooCommerce stores get wrong. In-store pickup is only a competitive capability when the pickup promise is visible on the product page, not on the shipping screen two steps later. By the time a buyer is choosing between delivery options, half the people who would have picked up the item have already closed the tab.

What Best Buy reported for fiscal 2025, from its Q4 earnings call on 4 March 2025 and the transcript published on its investor site:

• 45% of online orders were fulfilled via in-store pickup in Q4 fiscal 2025.
• Digital sales were nearly 40% of total domestic sales.
• Q4 enterprise revenue was $13.9 billion, with 0.5% comparable sales growth.

The transferable lesson is the one easiest to copy on a mid-market stack. Online is not a channel separate from the store; it is where the store is picked from. The brand that treats its online estate as a shelf browser for the local store, rather than a parallel distribution business, inherits the store’s advantage on considered purchases. The one that treats online and store as competing P&Ls spends a decade finding out the hard way that they are not.

What the Three Share, and Where the Mid-Market Advantage Hides

Three different retailers, three different categories, one recurring pattern. First, unit-level inventory accuracy is the real precondition. Not approximate, not refreshed overnight: accurate at the level of a single SKU in a single store, in near real time, because the pickup promise is written against that number. Second, the pickup option sits upstream in the buying flow, not downstream. A radio button on the shipping screen does not count. A visible “ready to pick up today at X” badge on the product tile does. Third, store staff are treated as the picking team, with a tablet workflow and a labour forecast, not as cashiers who occasionally pick an order “when it is quiet”.

The counter-intuitive piece: this is one of the few capabilities where mid-market operators can genuinely outcompete the giants. A chain of ten stores can offer a thirty-minute promise with less engineering than a chain of two thousand, because the inventory system has to be accurate across ten locations rather than two thousand. The ceiling on quality is set by the smallest unit of inventory the system can see, and smaller operators have an inherent advantage on that number.

What It Takes to Ship This Inside a WooCommerce Estate

WooCommerce out of the box does not do multi-location inventory with any seriousness. The core stock number is a single integer per variation. The first job in any click-and-collect build is to extend that to stock-by-location, either through a dedicated extension that writes inventory as structured meta against each store, or through a dedicated inventory platform that WooCommerce reads from via REST. For a merchant with three to ten stores, the extension route is usually right; past that, a dedicated inventory layer earns its licence fee within a quarter.

From there, the parts of the build that have to be done well, in rough order of cost to get wrong:

• Product-level pickup visibility. The pickup promise (“ready today at Kadıköy”) appears on the product tile and the product page, not inside the checkout. This is a theme change, not a plugin install, and it is where most click-and-collect projects quietly fail. Budget half a sprint on a Storefront or FSE theme, more on a bespoke theme.
• Store locator keyed to postcode. The buyer picks a store before they add to basket, not after. The locator reads from the same stock-by-location source, so the store list is already filtered to stores that have the item. One sprint.
• Order status workflow. At minimum: ordered, ready-for-pickup, picked-up, no-show cycle at 48 hours with inventory returned to shelf. Standard WooCommerce order statuses need extending and the email flow attached to each transition. Half a sprint.
• Staff pick-list on tablet. A back-office screen that lists the orders waiting at this store, lets a picker mark items collected, and prints a shelf-ready pick ticket. This is where off-the-shelf extensions stop and a bit of custom work usually starts. One to two sprints depending on how clean the barcode story is on the warehouse side.
• Capacity windows. The checkout limits pickup to the half-hour slots the store can actually service, computed from staffing. Without this, Saturday mornings produce a queue the store cannot absorb and the brand pays for in bad reviews. Half a sprint if your scheduling library is sensible, a sprint if it is not.

Rough end-to-end for a merchant with three to ten stores, 3,000 to 10,000 SKUs, on an existing WooCommerce estate: four to six sprints of two engineers, plus a half-day change on the warehouse side to get the barcode scan matching variation IDs. Call it two to three months at a mid-market agency’s blended rate, with the inventory accuracy audit happening in parallel in the first two weeks. The audit is the piece that gets skipped and should not: without it the pickup promise is a bet, and the bet gets called on week one.

The common objection from brands with a small store estate is that this is overkill. The honest answer is that a tenth of the Walmart build is still ninety percent of the business value, because the business value lives in the stock-accuracy regime and the product-page visibility, both of which are the same work regardless of store count. The parts that scale with store count are the operations training and the dispatcher UI, which get added later.

If your estate has between three and twenty stores and a working WooCommerce site, the piece we would do first for you is not a canopy and not a mobile checkout rewrite. It is a one-week audit of unit-level stock accuracy across every location, measured against a sample of fifty SKUs per store counted by hand on a Monday morning. If the audit comes back above 97%, the rest of the build is tractable in a quarter. If it comes back below, the click-and-collect project is a cover for the inventory project that needed doing anyway, and the next conversation is a different one. Either way, that is the conversation to start.