Retail Designers Increasingly Designate Space to E-Commerce Uses

The ecommerce and brick-and-mortar worlds are colliding, and designers are finding creative ways to integrate the two. According to Greg Lyon, of Nadel Architects, “Retail designers are increasingly designating space to accommodate ecommerce pick up and distribution.”

The trend isn’t new. Retail owners have been refining store plans to better integrate ecommerce uses for years, but the pandemic accelerated online shopping and blurred the line between and virtual and physical purchase. “While the shift towards ecommerce for both daily needs and specialty retail is an ongoing trend that has led stakeholders to reevaluate their tenant mixes as well as store and center layouts and branding over the past several years, the pandemic created a further sense of urgency for retail designers to think outside of the box to stay relevant to consumers,” Lyon, chairman and principal of Nadel, tells GlobeSt.com.

In many cases, in-store space is being repurposed for online fulfillment in the store. According to Lyon, this leads to “shifts in store planning and a need for strategic, streamlined designs that facilitate clear flows of traffic.”

Nadel recently worked on the interior design of a Sprouts grocery store and included a “click and collect” center in the store, where shoppers that purchased groceries online could pick them up in store themselves or utilize a delivery service. “The designated room for this service is equipped with refrigerators for perishable food and heaters for prepared food, where shoppers and delivery services can collect orders quickly and easily,” says Lyon.

Lyon believes that the trend of pick-up in store will become a standard in the future, creating a need for more integration between online and in-store shopping. “As shipping costs continue to increase, so does the cost of shipping goods to customers’ homes. Many retailers are finding it is less expensive to ship items from their stores, because these are located closer to where people live,” he says. “By designing retail stores to incorporate more of this warehouse and distribution space, it can save the retailer shipping costs in the long run and provide the rapid same- and next-day delivery consumers increasingly desire.”

Integrating online shopping tools in the store doesn’t detract from the store’s overall experience, which Lyon says continues to be the ultimate goal for retail designers: “In an increasingly digital world, offering unique experiences that cannot be obtained through staying at home has also become more important as the pandemic has made many consumers more dependent on online shopping.”