Online photo processing driving store pick-up at Walgreens

If one of the web’s jobs at a multi-channel retailer is to pull customers who place their order online into their stores for pick-up, Walgreen Co.`s recently-launched photo service is giving web customers one more reason to stop in the store. A relationship with HP Snapfish lets customers upload photos to Snapfish.com, or to Walgreens.com, for processing and then pick prints up at a Walgreens store an hour later. Walgreen has said that about 80% of the photos uploaded online for processing are picked up in a store within a few hours, according to Mark Miller, a retail analyst for William Blair & Co.

“The online photo service has significantly exceeded Walgreen’s expectations,” says Miller. “It’s about convenience.”

In-store pick-up – whether of prescriptions, health and beauty products or photo prints – is core to pharmacy chains’ web strategies, according to Vikram Sehgal, a Jupiter Research analyst, who says that drugstore chains that added an Internet channel as a hedge during the dot-com boom with the worry that the web would overtake brick and mortar stores now see a utility for their web sites beyond online sales. “They realized that online sales weren’t going to do that, and that their consumers don’t necessarily prefer the channel. So now they’ve moved to the store pick-up model,” he says.