Omnichannel retail strategy

[7] The great surge in adoption of the bricks and clicks model came around 2000, with large retailers, such as Walmart, starting websites that allow users to browse some of the same goods that they would find in store from their personal computer screens.

The model has many alternative combinations, as well as the related omnichannel concept of showrooming where customers try on clothing in person but the actual purchased product is ordered in-store on the retailer's website and delivered to their home later.

By the mid-2010s, the success of the model had discredited earlier theories that the Internet would render traditional retailers obsolete through disintermediation.

The International Council of Shopping Centers found that more than a third of customers who picked up orders made additional purchases while doing so, with that number increasing to 86% during the Thanksgiving to New Year's holiday season.

Nonetheless, U.S. retailers were some years behind their European peers in adopting the practice, which had not yet reached a scale where it posed a significant challenge to Amazon.

[12] In Greece, by contrast, in December 2020, it was reported that 90 percent of small business retailers did not have the infrastructure to enable click and collect or curbside pickup.

[13] With the arrival of COVID-19 and consumers' desire not to enter retail stores for fear of exposure to the virus, curbside pickup took off.

A variant on "Click and Collect", customers order online or by phone and pick up the merchandise, packed and ready to put in their car trunk, at the curb of the retail store or warehouse.

[15] The[17] term "Bricks and Clicks" has been used by Advertising Age to refer to how what some call Omnichannel retail strategy has been well used by Walmart.