Debenhams to roll out Doddle Click & Collect points across its store estate

Online shoppers at Amazon, ASOS, Missguided and almost 50 other brands will be able to collect their purchases at branches of Debenhams nationwide as the department store begins the full roll-out of the Doddle Click & Collect service across its store estate.

Debenhams has been trialling the Doddle service at 50 of its stores and is now extending it to all 165 branches with the majority due to be live by Spring 2019.

The department store said that during the trial 150,000 Doddle customers chose Debenhams as their Click & Collect point and almost a third of them (30%) went on to make a purchase in-store with an average basket value of £25.

It also found that 40% of those customers who made a purchase had never before shopped in Debenhams, demonstrating the power of driving the increased footfall to its stores.

Doddle CEO Tim Robinson described the partnership as "the ultimate win-win". "It enables us to offer the convenience-led UK omnichannel shopper an ever-greater number of high profile, convenient and trusted locations to collect and return parcels at and enables Debenhams to attract a high spending new demographic into its stores.

“The conversion of that footfall into such meaningful sales during the trial period demonstrates the crucial role Click & Collect services like ours can play during this critical time for the UK high street.”

Debenhams Managing Director, Retail, Food, Digital and Events Ross Clemmow said offering the service was part of the department store's "Debenhams Redesigned" strategy which aims to place experience at the heart of its stores.

“Thanks to this ground-breaking partnership, customers now have the convenience of being able to collect and return their online shopping from over 50 retailers from Debenhams at the same time as discovering our re-imagined shopping experience.

“Partnering with Doddle was the natural choice.  Their leading tech allows us to offer a seamless Click & Collect service whilst their focus on customer service aligned perfectly with ours.  The fact that the partnership has driven six figure parcel volumes within the first few months of trial provides testimony to the fact that together we’re providing a service UK consumers really value,” Clemmow said.

Doddle, which works with 50 big name online retailers including Net-A-Porter, River Island, Topshop and Zalando, is running a similar Click & Collect service with Morrisons enabling shoppers to combine their online collections and returns with supermarket shopping.

The company also drives the Click & Collect service that Marks & Spencer offers to its own online shoppers at its Simply Food outlets. The service was recently expanded to allow customers to return online purchases in the Simply Food stores, as well as collect them.

Debenhams has being doing much to improve its in-store service offer of late with the introduction of Blow LTD blow-dry and beauty bars in key stores as well the roll-out of gyms, in partnership with Sweat!, to some locations which begins this month.