NBA Store’s new self-service kiosks for online pickups.
The NBA Store is borrowing from Amazon’s self-service locker kiosk idea and now letting people who purchased goods from the online NBA store to pick up their purchases at the league’s flagship brick-and-mortar store in midtown Manhattan.
Apex Order Pick-Up Technologies, which makes these kiosks for a number of clients in the foodservice and retail industries, announced this week a pick-up program with licensed sports merchandise company Fanatics, which manages the online and physical NBA store.
The deal enables online shoppers to pick up select items, such as team and league hats, T-shirts and sweatshirts, in person at the Fifth Avenue NBA Store in New York City. If Fanatics finds that people are using them, it says it plans to expand the lockers to other sites later in 2018.
“Fanatics is a new breed of retailer, designing a comprehensive, tech-infused strategy to meet the sports fan’s insatiable, on-demand expectations,” Apex CEO Kent Savage said in a statement.
Once a customer’s order is ready for pickup, a notification comes via SMS or email with instructions on where and how to collect the purchase. At the kiosk, a barcode unlocks a secure locker compartment that contains the purchase, a process Apex says takes a few seconds.
Apex’s lockers last year were used by Delaware North Sportservice and deployed at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte where the Carolina Panthers play for retail merchandise and Great American Ball Park where the Cincinnati Reds play for food and beverage items.
Self-service kiosks have been an increasing presence across the brick-and-mortar retail scene. For example, Amazon’s lockers at dozens of U.S. locations let people pick up and make returns on online purchases in person, while Redbox lets people rent and return movies as though they’re ordering chips at a vending machine, though the latter has suffered tremendously at the hands of streaming companies.
With Fanatics’ kiosks, the idea that people are purchasing actual physical goods — rather than services — give these kiosks a potential advantage in the competitive online shopping space by letting customers order online and pick up goods the same day at their convenience.
In that sense, the kiosks offer a compromise between online and brick-and-mortar shopping by cutting out delivery wait times and helping customers avoid in-store lines.
