Click & Collect: How to Let Customers Order Online and Pick Up in Store

Meet Hélène, cheese shop owner in Annecy

Hélène has been running La Cave à Fromages for eleven years. Lovely shop, loyal customers, the usual Saturday queue out the door. But two things were eating at her:

• Regulars calling at 11am to "reserve a Mont d'Or for tonight" — and she'd scribble it on a Post-it that sometimes got lost.
• Office workers who wanted to grab a cheese platter on Friday evening but didn't have 20 minutes to wait.

So last November she set up Click & Collect: customers order and pay on her website, she prepares the order, they swing by and pick it up. Six months later, she's doing about 35 pickup orders a week, average basket 28€. That's roughly 980€ a week she wasn't capturing before — enough to cover her shop's electricity bill three times over.

Here's exactly how she did it, what it cost, and the mistakes to avoid.

What "Click & Collect" actually means

No mystery: the customer chooses products on a web page, pays online, picks a pickup slot ("Friday between 5pm and 6pm"), and shows up. You hand them the bag. Done.

The whole thing rests on three small pieces:

1. An online ordering page — where customers see your products and pay.
2. A way to receive the order — usually an email, a printed ticket, or a notification on a tablet behind the counter.
3. A simple stock system — so you don't sell the last Comté twice.

The tools Hélène compared

She looked at four options. Here's the honest comparison:

| Tool | What it is | Monthly cost | Setup time | |------|------------|--------------|------------| | Shopify | A complete online shop builder. You list products, customers order, you get notified. | 36€/month + 1.6% per transaction | 1 weekend | | Sumup Online Store | Free add-on to the Sumup card reader many shops already use. Basic but works. | 0€ + 1.5% per transaction | Half a day | | HelloAsso / Petit Marché | French-made, simpler pages, good for occasional orders. | Free, optional tip | 2 hours | | Wix + payment module | Drag-and-drop website with an order feature bolted on. | 25€/month | 1 weekend |

Hélène picked Sumup Online Store because she already used a Sumup card reader in the shop, so payments landed in the same bank account with no extra paperwork. Total monthly cost: 0€. Transaction fee: 1.5%, meaning on a 28€ order she pays 42 cents — about the cost of one slice of her cheapest tomme.

Connecting it to the cash register

This is where most shop owners get scared. Don't be.

Hélène's cash register is a Tiller tablet (a touchscreen till that costs around 59€/month and tracks sales product by product). Tiller talks directly to Sumup, so when an online order comes in, it appears as a line in the till just like a normal sale. End of day, her total matches. No double entry.

If your till is older or paper-based, the simplest setup is:

• Online orders land in a dedicated email inbox (e.g. commandes@lacaveafromages.fr).
• A small thermal printer next to the counter (Epson TM-T20, ~180€ one-off) prints the ticket the moment the order arrives.
• At end of day, you ring up online orders as a single "Click & Collect" line in your till.

That's it. No connector, no headache.

Managing stock without losing your mind

Hélène's rule: only put on the website what you always have in stock. Her 25 "safe bets" — Comté 18 months, Beaufort d'été, Saint-Marcellin, butter from Bordier, etc. The rare seasonal stuff stays in the shop only.

For those 25 products, she updates quantities once a week, every Monday morning, in 15 minutes. If she sells out mid-week (rare), the product auto-hides on the site.

For shops with bigger catalogues — say, a hardware store with 800 references — you'll want a till that syncs stock automatically. Tiller, Square (a similar tablet till, around 0€ to start, 1.65% per card payment), and Hiboutik (a French till, free for one shop) all do this.

The 7-step checklist to launch in two weekends

1. Pick 15 to 30 products you always have in stock. No exceptions.
2. Photograph each one with your phone, natural daylight, white background (a sheet of paper works).
3. Write a 2-line description: weight, origin, taste in plain words.
4. Choose your tool (see table above). Don't overthink it.
5. Set pickup slots: 30-minute windows, max 3 orders per slot.
6. Test with a friend — have them place a real order, pay, pick up. Fix what's clunky.
7. Announce it: a small sign at the counter, an Instagram post, an email to your regulars.

What went wrong (and how she fixed it)

• Week 2: A customer ordered at 4:55pm for 5pm pickup. Hélène was elbow-deep in a wheel of Roquefort. → She set a 2-hour minimum lead time. Problem gone.
• Week 5: An order email landed in spam. → She added a 5€ thermal printer alert (a small bell that rings when a ticket prints).
• Month 3: Some customers "forgot" to come. → She added an automatic SMS reminder via Sumup (3 cents per message — less than one olive).

The numbers, six months in

• Setup cost: 0€ for software, 180€ for the printer. Recouped in 9 days.
• Time spent per order: 4 minutes preparing, 1 minute handing over.
• Extra weekly revenue: ~980€.
• Saturday queue: noticeably shorter, because regulars now pre-order their weekend cheese.

Key takeaways

• Start with 15-30 products you always have in stock. Don't try to put your whole shop online.
• A free tool like Sumup Online Store is enough to begin — you can upgrade later if you grow.
• A 180€ thermal printer is the single best investment to avoid missing an order.
• Set a minimum lead time (2 hours) and SMS reminders from day one.
• Test the whole flow yourself, as a customer, before announcing it to anyone.