Getting BOPIS Right: Lessons From Big Box Retail and How Bloomreach Makes It Work

On paper, BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store) is simple: place an order online, drive to your local store, and pick it up without wandering the aisles. In reality, especially with groceries, it’s a minefield of broken promises.

If you’ve shopped for groceries online, you’ve probably experienced it:

• Searching for “organic almond milk” and getting 10 results, most of which aren’t stocked in your local store
• Filling your cart with carefully chosen items, only to have half of them disappear during checkout
• Being offered substitutions you’d never pick for yourself, like replacing fresh spinach with frozen spinach

For grocery shoppers, this isn’t just inconvenient — it can completely derail dinner plans or force a second trip to another store.

Unlike other retail sectors, grocery BOPIS is driven by immediacy and locality. Customers aren’t ordering a sweater that can arrive in five days. They’re deciding what’s for dinner tonight, what snacks the kids need tomorrow morning, and whether they can bake that cake before guests arrive. This makes speed, accuracy, inventory awareness, and personalization absolutely non-negotiable.

The problem? Grocery is messy. Product catalogs are massive, naming conventions are inconsistent, substitution rules vary wildly, and stock changes minute by minute. Without the right technology and processes, the whole thing feels like chaos to the customer and the store team.

From my work on BOPIS implementations for some of the largest retailers in North America, I’ve seen the same pain points over and over again. Below are the four critical lessons and how Bloomreach helps solve them.

Lesson 1: Search Starts With Local Stock

If it’s not available near me, it shouldn’t be in my search results.

Search is the front door to your BOPIS experience, and if that door is broken, customers don’t even make it inside. In BOPIS, search isn’t just about showing the most relevant product — it’s about showing the most relevant product that’s actually available for pickup at the customer’s chosen store.

Here’s where many retailers stumble: Their search engines don’t factor in fulfillment context. That means you might get ten results for “almond milk,” but only one is available for pickup at your local store (and it’s buried halfway down the page). By the time customers figure this out, trust has already eroded.

Here’s how to make it work better:

• Enrich product data with store-level pickup eligibility and availability
• Use AI-powered ranking to boost in-stock, locally available products to the top
• Allow regional teams to fine-tune assortments so search reflects local nuances

Imagine typing “blueberries” and instantly seeing only the two brands in stock at your store, ranked by your personal purchase history and what’s freshest locally. That’s what Bloomreach Discovery delivers: search that “just knows” what’s available to you, because it actually does.

Lesson 2: Inventory Accuracy Is Everything

If your availability data lags, your customers leave.

Many retailers treat inventory visibility as a checkbox: just display an “In Stock” badge and call it a day. But in the grocery industry, stale inventory data can create instant disappointment and force customer service teams into damage control mode.

Inventory for BOPIS needs to be updated in real time and integrated across systems — your OMS, inventory services, and product catalog all need to be in sync. If not, shoppers end up adding unavailable items to their cart and discovering the bad news only at checkout (or worse, when they arrive for pickup).

Here’s how Bloomreach strengthens this step:

• Filters and ranks only products available at the specific store the customer selected
• Highlights fulfillment-ready items in both search and browse, reducing last-minute substitutions
• Separates searchability from ranking, allowing you to keep niche products searchable for special cases without cluttering the main results

Think about it this way: If a customer is shopping at 7 p.m. for an 8 p.m. pickup, you only have one hour to make their order frictionless. Outdated or partial inventory data ruins that experience instantly.

Lesson 3: Personalization Powers Efficiency

BOPIS isn’t just about buying — it’s about buying smart.

Retailers often make the mistake of treating every BOPIS shopper the same. In reality, personalization makes both the customer and the store team happier.

Without personalization:

• Customers see irrelevant items, making the search-to-cart journey longer
• Store teams get odd, split orders that require multiple store zones to fulfill
• Fulfillment SLAs (service level agreements) get harder to meet

When personalization is applied strategically:

• Customers see pickup-eligible products relevant to their purchase history, local buying trends, and seasonal demand
• Orders are subtly steered toward items easier and faster to fulfill, reducing operational strain
• Recommendations, search, and merchandising collections dynamically adjust to store capacity and shopper behavior patterns

For example, if a customer regularly buys lactose-free milk, their search results for “milk” can show in-stock lactose-free options first. If the store is under heavy load, recommendations can prioritize products from nearby shelves to reduce fulfillment time.

Personalization here is more than marketing — it’s an operational advantage.

Lesson 4: BOPIS Is a Workflow, Not a Feature

One weak link in the chain, and the whole experience breaks.

Many retailers still think of BOPIS as a “feature” — a button on the website. In reality, it’s an end-to-end workflow that requires multiple systems to work together flawlessly:

1. Search surfaces only locally available products
2. Product pages (PDPs) show live, store-specific stock levels
3. Cart validation ensures all items are eligible for pickup
4. Checkout confirms timing and SLA before payment
5. Store systems get instant notifications to start fulfillment
6. Customers receive personalized communications with status updates

If even one of these steps fails (e.g., cart validation doesn’t filter out a sold-out item or store notifications arrive late), the customer experience unravels.

Bloomreach acts as the connective tissue at the discovery layer. By making the product discovery stage fulfillment-aware, it ensures that every downstream step (cart, checkout, store pick, and customer updates) starts on the right foot.

Winning BOPIS Means Winning Loyalty

BOPIS is deceptively hard. It’s not just an extra checkout option — it’s a coordinated, real-time dance between search, inventory, personalization, and fulfillment systems.

Grocery customers don’t just want to place an order; they want confidence. They want to know that what they see online is what they’ll get at pickup, on time, without substitutions they didn’t approve.

Bloomreach Discovery is your key to getting BOPIS right. Our AI-powered platform is intelligent enough to surface highly relevant recommendations while balancing inventory and fulfillment. Start building greater trust and long-lasting loyalty today — learn more about how Bloomreach can help your grocery business thrive.