Key takeaways
- Click and collect has become a core part of omnichannel retail, bridging the convenience of online shopping with the immediacy of in-store collection.
- In-store and online are no longer two separate experiences. Customers mix both fluidly — browsing online, checking reviews, comparing prices mid-aisle — which means brands need research methods that can track behaviour across both.
- Focus groups struggle to capture this kind of omnichannel behaviour. They're limited by group bias, recall, and the logistics of putting people in a room.
- Mobile ethnography is a strong fit for click and collect research. Participants can document their real-world and digital shopping journey using video, photos, and screen recording from their smartphone.
- With Indeemo, retailers can recruit shoppers in hours, capture path-to-purchase data across physical and digital touchpoints, and analyse submissions with generative AI in 30+ languages.
What is click and collect research?
Click and collect research uses qualitative methods to understand how shoppers move between online browsing, purchase, and in-store collection. It's about capturing the full journey — what triggers the online search, how the decision is made, what happens at the point of collection, and what drives loyalty or churn across that hybrid experience.
Because the journey spans digital and physical moments, it needs research methods that can follow the shopper across both. That's where mobile ethnography comes in.
Why has click and collect reshaped retail?
The growth of omnichannel shopping has been evident for years. E-commerce is no longer a growth experiment sitting alongside physical retail; it's a core part of how people shop. That shift has created a significant opportunity for research and design consultancies to support the ongoing digitisation of retail.
In-store and online shopping were traditionally seen as two different experiences. In a digitised age, that separation doesn't reflect reality. Many shoppers use online stores to window shop and get familiar with current collections. They read reviews and testimonials before planning their purchase. When they're in-store, they often use their phones to learn more about the products they're browsing — or to check for a cheaper or more convenient alternative elsewhere.
Click and collect emerged as a link between online and in-store. It gives shoppers the convenience of ordering without standing in a checkout queue, combined with the immediacy of collecting their purchase shortly afterwards. For retailers, it creates a hybrid touchpoint that blends digital and physical in one journey.
How has click and collect evolved?
Once offered mainly by large retailers and catalogue sellers like Argos, click and collect has transformed how people shop. It reduces the time spent trying to find a specific product across multiple stores and the frustration of queueing at the checkout.
It also competes with online delivery. Instead of waiting for a delayed package or finding a delivery left outside in the rain, customers get a safe, instant alternative. It's also a viable shipping replacement for products that are expensive or impractical to post because of size or weight.
Businesses are now reinventing the model and going beyond in-store collection. Partnerships with third-party stores, convenience shops, and even petrol stations extend the collection network.
In the UK, Argos partnered with Sainsbury's to offer collection from dedicated Argos points inside local Sainsbury's stores. With over 1,400 locations across the country, most of which are local convenience stores, the partnership brought Argos closer to customers while driving footfall through Sainsbury's.
Another example is clothing retailer Next. Their online platform stocks third-party retailers like River Island and All Saints, which lets the brand reach a wider audience without changing its underlying store estate. The existing network of Next stores supports growing volumes of click and collect orders and online returns, while also functioning as a showroom for online shoppers.
How does qualitative research fit omnichannel retail?
The shift to omnichannel is radically changing retail. It's driven by consumer demand for convenience and personalisation. As brand interactions change, research needs to change too.
Focus groups have been a key research method for many years, but they have limitations — group bias, recall constraints, and the logistics of bringing people together in one place. For omnichannel research, where behaviour happens across online and in-store moments across multiple days, focus groups struggle to capture what's actually going on.
Agile, mobile-first methods like mobile ethnography are better suited to modern, digitised research. A mobile research app on a participant's phone lets them document their real-world and digital experience as it happens. Video, photos, and text capture everyday in-the-moment behaviour, and mobile screen recording adds the online dimension.
Mobile screen recording is particularly powerful for click and collect. It captures online and mobile interactions — what triggers the search, how shoppers compare options, what influences the final decision. Combined with in-store video, it puts the researcher in the shopper's shoes across the full journey.
Why does asynchronous data collection work for click and collect?
The "in-the-moment" and "in-context" nature of mobile ethnography means researchers can analyse data as it arrives and follow up with more targeted questions to draw out richer insight. Because mobile ethnography is longitudinal, studies typically run for 7 or more days. That timeframe lets you observe how shoppers interact with different parts of the omnichannel journey and how their behaviour shifts across occasions.
"If you are making your next strategic business decision — which would you prefer: what a participant tells you about past events captured in front of a group of strangers in a one-hour focus group, or contextual, in-the-moment data recorded by participants privately over several days capturing repetitive, real-life behaviour?" — Eugene Murphy, CEO, Indeemo
What can mobile diary studies reveal about the click-to-collect journey?
With a mobile diary study, you can follow a shopper through every step of their decision-making process. That matters because the full journey — from browsing online, through an e-commerce store, to the in-store collection experience — is where the real insight lives.
By following a sample of shoppers, you witness their new habits and map their journey end to end. Alongside mapping your own brand experience, you get a view of the service your competitors are offering. Understanding where you win, and where you need to improve, lets you shape a more customer-centric experience and grow market share.
In a recent retail study, we observed customers searching for a product online, finding the nearest store to inspect it, discovering it was out of stock, and purchasing from a competitor while still inside the original store. That kind of insight — visible only through in-the-moment multimedia capture — could inspire a retailer to introduce tracked click and collect, letting customers reserve stock or order online and collect in-store to avoid losing the sale.
This shows how mobile-first research helps brands adapt and evolve to meet changing customer needs. By capturing both real-life and digital moments of the customer journey, mobile ethnography gathers data that a post-rationalised focus group never could.
What does this mean for retailers?
Traditional brick-and-mortar stores aren't going anywhere. Plenty of customers still love the personal, social experience of retail. But many brands are adapting the in-store experience to support multichannel shopping.
Whether through click and collect, showrooming, curated online experiences, or some combination, the retailers winning today are the ones treating digital and physical as a single journey rather than two separate channels. The research methods need to follow suit.
How does Indeemo support click and collect research?
Indeemo is built for the kind of longitudinal, in-context shopper research that click and collect demands. Alongside path-to-purchase and omnichannel studies, you can:
- Recruit shoppers in hours from a panel of 3 million+ respondents
- Capture in-the-moment videos, photos, screen recordings, and texts as shoppers move between online and in-store
- Transcribe submissions automatically in 30+ languages for multi-market studies
- Use generative AI for summarisation, translation, thematic analysis, and sentiment analysis to speed up analysis significantly
- Build multimedia journey maps from real shopper behaviour
Everything sits in one dashboard, which makes it practical to track shoppers across the full online-to-collection journey without stitching tools together.
Do you need to be a shopper research specialist?
No. Whether you're a retail insights team, a brand exploring omnichannel research for the first time, or an agency running work for a client, Indeemo can support you.
Use the platform independently if you have the expertise in-house, or partner with our Catalyst team for study design, recruitment, moderation, and analysis. If you have research ambitions but not the capacity to run the project yourself, we can lend a helping hand.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between click and collect and BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store)? They're effectively the same thing. "Click and collect" is more common in the UK and Europe; "BOPIS" is more common in the US. Both describe the hybrid model where customers order online and collect in person.
Why is mobile ethnography better than focus groups for click and collect research? Focus groups capture what people say about their shopping behaviour. Mobile ethnography captures what they actually do, across multiple occasions and environments. For a journey that spans online browsing and in-store collection, in-the-moment capture is essential.
How long should a click and collect research study run? Most studies run for 7 to 14 days, giving participants time to complete multiple shopping journeys. Longer studies (up to a month) can capture seasonal shopping behaviour or promotional moments.
How many participants do you need? Most click and collect studies work with 20 to 40 participants per market. Multi-market studies can involve 100+ participants. Because each shopper generates rich multi-format data across multiple journeys, sample sizes can be smaller than survey-based shopper research.
Can you use mobile ethnography to benchmark against competitors? Yes. Asking shoppers to document their full shopping journey — including where they compared options and why they chose one retailer over another — produces direct competitor benchmarking data grounded in real behaviour, not claimed preference.
