What is BOPIS?

BOPIS sits in an uncomfortable spot for a store owner. Customers expect it, competitors offer it, and the labor cost lands on floor staff who were already stretched. Run well, it turns an online order into foot traffic and a second sale. Run badly, it produces a canceled order and a customer at the counter being told the item they paid for is not there.

Here is the real fulfillment flow, the numbers worth trusting, and the setup detail that catches Shopify merchants out.

What is BOPIS? The Basics

BOPIS, spelled out, is buy online, pick up in store. The customer pays and completes the order on your website. The picking, packing, and handover happen inside a physical location.

That sequence matters. A BOPIS order is a completed sale tied to specific stock at a specific location. It is not a reservation, a hold, or an inquiry. If the item cannot be found on the shelf, you are refunding money that has already changed hands.

For the customer the draw is speed without a delivery fee. An item sitting two miles away can be in their hands the same afternoon with no courier wait and no shipping charge.

For the retailer the draw is simpler: the customer walks through the door. That footfall is the variable worth optimizing for, and it is the reason many store owners keep offering BOPIS even when the labor-per-order math looks punishing.

BOPIS only exists once omnichannel retail plumbing is in place. The website and the store must be reading the same stock count and the same order record, or the promise breaks before a staff member even starts picking.

BOPIS, Click and Collect, Curbside, BORIS and ROPIS

Five terms orbit the same idea, and they are not interchangeable.

Term	What it means	How it differs from BOPIS
BOPIS	Buy online, pick up in store. Paid online, collected at a counter.	The baseline case.
Click and collect	The common British and European name for the same service.	Usually a straight synonym, though some retailers stretch it to cover pay-on-collection too.
Curbside pickup	Paid online, carried out to the customer’s car in a marked bay.	Identical picking and packing. Only the handover changes.
BORIS	Buy online, return in store.	The reverse flow. Nothing is picked; a delivered item comes back as an in-store return.
ROPIS	Reserve online, pick up in store.	The customer holds the item but pays in person, so the sale can still fall through.

BOPIS and click and collect can be treated as the same service for planning purposes. The one that gets mis-budgeted is curbside: it is BOPIS with a longer handoff, and the extra minutes belong to a staff member walking to the parking lot and back.

ROPIS is worth a look for higher-value goods a customer wants to inspect before paying. It removes the refund risk but adds the risk that nobody shows up while the held stock sits off sale.

How a BOPIS Order Actually Flows

Seven steps, each with a characteristic failure. The whole chain runs from order placement to system close, and the two steps that cause the most damage are picking and final fulfillment marking. Neither is a technology problem. Both are questions of who does the work and whether they close the loop.

1. Order placed online. The customer picks a store at checkout. Breaks when the store list shows locations that cannot actually fulfill the item.
2. Order routed to a location. The system allocates stock to that store. Breaks when allocation is nominal and the units are not actually reserved, so a walk-in customer buys them an hour later.
3. Staff pick the items. Someone leaves what they were doing and finds the goods. Breaks when the shelf is empty, which is the single most common failure in the whole chain.
4. Order packed and staged. The items go into a bag with the order number attached. Breaks when there is no dedicated holding area and staged orders get re-merchandised back onto the floor.
5. Customer notified. A ready-for-pickup message goes out. Breaks when the notification fires on order receipt rather than on picking, and the customer arrives before the bag exists.
6. Identity and order verified. The associate checks the order number or ID. Breaks when verification is skipped at a busy counter, which turns pickup counters into a soft target for retail shrinkage.
7. Order marked fulfilled. The system closes the order. Breaks when staff hand over the bag but never mark it, leaving stock and revenue reporting wrong.

Step 3 is where the customer’s trust gets tested. Step 7 is where the books get muddied. Fix those two and most of the operational risk in a BOPIS rollout disappears.

Why Inventory Accuracy Decides Whether BOPIS Works

BOPIS turns a stock count into a promise. Most retail processes tolerate a count that is slightly off. A customer who has already paid does not.

Picture a one-location gift shop using Shopify with local pickup enabled. A customer orders three items at 10am and selects in-store collection. If one of those three sold to a walk-in twenty minutes earlier and the POS did not adjust the count, the associate cannot fulfill the order as placed. What should have been a two-minute pick becomes a phone call, a substitution or partial refund, and an apology delivered at the counter.

Platforms defend against this in a way that is easy to overlook. In Shopify, the pickup option for a location simply does not appear at checkout when the item is out of stock at that location, even if inventory is plentiful elsewhere in the business. The protection is genuine, and so is the catch: if per-location counts drift low or negative because of untracked breakage, returns, or theft, the pickup option quietly disappears and you never see an error message. Orders that would have converted just do not.

Cycle counting the fast-moving lines, scanning every delivery in, and watching inventory turnover per location are what keep the promise honest. A stockout a customer spots on the product page is a lost sale. A stockout they discover after paying is a refund and a complaint.

The Labor Cost Nobody Budgets For

The clearest published data on this comes from grocery, and you should read it as grocery data.

Wharton professors Santiago Gallino and Marshall Fisher, writing in Harvard Business Review in July 2024, put the labor added by online grocery fulfillment at roughly 27 extra minutes of store labor per in-store pickup order, on top of the 30 minutes a traditional shopping trip already consumes. Fulfilling from a back room or dark store rather than the sales floor cut that to about 17 minutes. Curbside was heavier again at roughly 32.6 minutes, or 22.6 minutes from a back room.

Grocery baskets are large and picking runs across a big footprint, so a small apparel or gift retailer grabbing three items off one floor will not hit 27 minutes. The transferable point is the shape of the finding: picking from the sales floor is the expensive version, and offering free pickup with no labor line in the budget means the pickup service is being funded out of margin.

Staging space, chasing no-show orders, and restocking abandoned bags all sit on the same ledger line, and none of them appear in the software subscription price.

Setting Up BOPIS in Shopify POS

In Shopify, BOPIS is called local pickup, and it is two distinct pieces of configuration that a merchant sets up per location.

• Enable local pickup per location. This lives in the Shopify admin under Settings, then Shipping and delivery, and you turn it on one location at a time. There is no single business-wide switch.
• Subscribe that location to POS Pro. Preparing pickup orders, sending the ready notification, and marking orders fulfilled from inside Shopify POS requires the Pro tier at that location.
• Grant the staff permission. Any team member who handles pickups needs Fulfill shipping and pickup orders enabled on their POS role. Without it the pickup tile is visible but does nothing.
• Know the exceptions. Digital products fulfill automatically and never enter the pickup queue. Subscriptions and gift cards cannot be picked up at all.

The permission step is the one most often missed, because it fails silently: staff see the orders and simply cannot action them. Comparing tiers before committing is worth the time, and the Shopify POS systems breakdown covers what the Pro tier adds beyond pickup. Retailers on other platforms should confirm the equivalent, since the POS features that matter most for pickup are order visibility and per-location stock, not the register hardware itself.

Does BOPIS Increase Sales?

There is one solid finding and a great deal of noise.

The International Council of Shopping Centers surveyed shoppers between February 21 and 24, 2019 and published in March 2019 that 67% of click-and-collect users bought additional items from the same retailer while collecting an order, and 60% made a purchase at a nearby store. That is the case for BOPIS in one line: the pickup trip is a second selling opportunity the retailer did not pay for with an ad campaign.

The noise is worth naming so you can spot it elsewhere. A number of widely quoted BOPIS statistics do not survive checking. An often-repeated adoption figure traces back to a 2018 consumer survey and is now eight years old with no date attached where it appears. A frequently cited attach-rate percentage looks like a garbled restatement of the 2019 ICSC finding above. Order-growth numbers in the hundreds come from single vendors reporting their own platform data during the 2020 pandemic spike and cannot be generalized.

Track the attach rate on collection in your own point of sale reporting instead. It is a number you can actually verify, and it belongs to your store, not a survey panel.

Related Terms

• Click and collect: the same service under a different name.
• Omnichannel retail: the shared records BOPIS depends on.
• Ship-from-store: the outbound version of store fulfillment.
• Stockout: what breaks a pickup promise.
• Retail shrinkage: why pickup verification matters.