Before Click and Collect: How Retail Redesigned the Customer’s Journey

Long before a website could bring a shop into someone’s home, a printed catalogue was doing part of that job. It presented choices, described products and asked a customer to make a decision without touching the goods.

That makes the familiar story of retail moving from bricks to clicks rather misleading. Shopping did not begin as a purely physical experience and suddenly become remote when the internet arrived. Retailers had already spent generations experimenting with how people could browse, compare, order and receive things.

The more interesting history concerns control. Who holds the information? Who selects the product? What does the customer have to understand before buying? And where does the decision become a handover to another person or system?

A mail-order catalogue, a self-service supermarket and a collection counter look different. Yet each has to solve versions of those questions. Their history offers a practical lesson for businesses designing websites, signs, packaging or premises today: changing the channel does not remove the customer’s uncertainty. It changes where that uncertainty must be answered.

The catalogue was already an interface

The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives holds a John Wanamaker Spring & Summer Catalog from 1915. Its account of the catalogue draws a direct comparison with online shopping: detailed descriptions helped customers choose from home more than a century ago.

Calling a catalogue an interface may sound like a modern label placed on an old object. But it captures the design problem. The reader sees a representation of a product rather than the product itself. The page has to make the range understandable and explain enough for someone to act.

The catalogue cannot respond when the reader looks puzzled. Its pictures, headings and descriptions have to anticipate the missing conversation. What is this item? Which version is being shown? What would distinguish it from the item beside it?

There is an important difference between displaying a large assortment and helping someone choose from it. A page can contain plenty of products while leaving the reader unsure where to begin. More choice creates more work unless the organisation of that choice improves too.

This is our design interpretation of the historical object, not a claim about the catalogue’s measured sales performance. Its usefulness lies in the recognisable task: printed information was already being asked to bridge the distance between a buyer and goods they could not inspect.

The screen did not invent that distance. It gave designers another way to work across it.

Then the customer moved behind the counter

In September 1916, Clarence Saunders opened his first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee. The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center describes the development in its history of self-service store aisles. Saunders applied for a “Self Serving Store” patent the following month; US Patent 1,242,872 was granted in 1917.

The important change was not simply a different shop name. Customers could move through a planned route and select goods themselves, rather than relying on a grocer behind the counter to assemble their shopping.

The patent drawings make the route visible. Choosing was connected to movement through the store. The layout did not merely accommodate the transaction; it helped organise the circumstances in which the customer made decisions.

Our interpretation is that self-service redistributed the conversation. A member of staff could previously identify an item, explain an alternative or interpret a request. When the customer selected products directly, more of that explanatory work had to be available without the same exchange.

A label, a shelf position and a recognisable package could now help answer questions at the point of choice. This does not mean packaging was unimportant before self-service, or that one store invented every subsequent retail practice. It means the arrangement made the customer-facing information especially consequential.

The apparent simplicity of picking something from a shelf depends on several things working together. The buyer must recognise the category, identify the relevant item and understand enough about it to decide.

A business can transfer a task to the customer. It cannot assume that the customer has also acquired all the knowledge needed to complete it.

Freedom to browse is not the same as freedom from design

Self-service sounds like the removal of mediation. In practice, the mediation changes form. Instead of one person explaining the assortment, the arrangement of the assortment provides part of the explanation.

That is why the physical route matters. A customer can be given choices while still being guided through a deliberately organised environment. The display establishes what is nearby, what appears important and what is easy to compare.

The same distinction applies online. A website can allow a visitor to move freely while still imposing an order through categories, photographs and prominent links. A page does not become neutral merely because the customer is doing the clicking.

This is not automatically a criticism. Guidance can be genuinely helpful. A clear category can save time; an accurate photograph can resolve doubt; a well-placed explanation can prevent a wrong choice.

The useful test is whether the guidance serves the customer’s decision or merely the business’s desire to push something forward. If an attractive display hides important limitations, the transaction may become easier initially but harder afterwards.

Retail design therefore has a double responsibility: make the next action understandable and make the information supporting that action trustworthy. A short route to a poorly understood choice is not necessarily good service.

A packet of chewing gum joined the physical and digital worlds

The barcode provides another reason to question a clean division between old-fashioned shops and digital commerce. According to GS1 US’s account of the first UPC checkout scan, a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on 26 June 1974.

That was a specific UPC retail milestone, not the invention of every kind of barcode. The distinction matters because an appealing first-in-history claim can become inaccurate when the category is left undefined.

For this story, the significance is the connection. A physical item could be identified by a machine-readable mark. The package and the information system were parts of the same transaction.

The customer still entered a building, selected goods and carried them away. Yet information technology was operating within that physical shopping experience. “Digital” did not have to mean that the buyer was sitting at home.

There is a useful contrast here. The catalogue represented a product to a distant person. The barcode represented a product to a system. Both depended on an orderly relationship between the representation and the thing being sold.

A beautiful description attached to the wrong item is not useful. A perfectly readable identifier attached to inaccurate information is not useful either. Appearance and accuracy have to travel together.

For businesses today, this is a reminder that the visible customer experience rests on less visible arrangements. Product descriptions, item records and staff knowledge need to agree. A polished front end cannot compensate indefinitely for a confused handover behind it.

The Web changed the medium, not every underlying problem

CERN’s history of the World Wide Web records Tim Berners-Lee’s work there in 1989 and the release of Web software into the public domain on 30 April 1993. The project began around information-sharing, not as a ready-made retail checkout.

The distinction between the Web and the internet is worth preserving. They are not interchangeable names for precisely the same thing. The Web supplied a way to link and navigate information over an existing network.

For a retailer, linked pages offered a different way to organise a range. A visitor could move from an overview to a particular item without leafing through an entire printed volume. Details could be revised without replacing every distributed copy.

Those possibilities changed the working medium. They did not guarantee a useful shop. A catalogue could be confusing; a website could be confusing faster, across more pages.

The business still had to decide how to group its products, which details mattered, how to represent variations and what the buyer should do next. A new technical capability did not automatically supply those answers.

Nor did a website eliminate fulfilment. Goods still needed to exist, match the description and reach the customer through an appropriate process. A distant buyer’s confidence could be damaged by a missing detail on the page, a poor response afterwards or a disappointing item.

The visible click was only one part of the work.

Argos ended a catalogue—not the need for physical places

Argos offers a particularly useful interruption to the idea that retail’s destination must be an entirely screen-based experience. In its 2020 strategy update, Sainsbury’s said it had stopped printing the Argos catalogue as customers increasingly shopped online.

The same statement said the Christmas Gift Guide would continue in print. It also set out plans for additional Argos stores and collection points inside Sainsbury’s premises. These were the company’s announced decisions and plans; the statement alone does not establish every later outcome.

The combination is more informative than a headline declaring the death of print. The company was changing the jobs assigned to different formats. A large general catalogue, a seasonal guide, a website and a collection location did not have to be retained or abandoned as one package.

Our reading is that this exposes the weakness of treating media as teams in a contest. Print did not have to defeat the website. A physical location did not have to duplicate every role of a traditional shop.

A customer might want to browse in one place and receive the item in another. The business needed to connect those stages rather than pretend they belonged to separate kinds of customer.

We should not turn that observation into a claim that the strategy succeeded because of one design decision. The source describes a much wider operating plan. Its value here is showing that a change in browsing format can coexist with investment in physical handover.

The difficult part is often between the channels

A customer journey is easy to draw as a line: browse, choose, order, collect. The awkwardness frequently appears between those words.

Does “choose” mean the customer has selected the exact item or merely expressed interest? Does “order” mean the request has been received or accepted? Does “collect” mean the goods are definitely ready or that the customer should come in to discuss them?

Businesses can use the same word for different stages without noticing. Customers then make reasonable assumptions that the internal process does not support.

This is an illustrative problem, not a report of a specific retailer’s failure. It is useful because the correction is usually more concrete than a grand digital-transformation programme: make the stage and next action explicit.

An acknowledgement should not imply readiness. An availability enquiry should not look like a confirmed purchase. A collection instruction should say what the customer needs to know before travelling.

The design includes language as well as buttons. A familiar-looking control can create a strong expectation. If the underlying service works differently, the explanation needs to arrive before the customer acts, not afterwards.

Retail’s physical and digital experiences meet at those handovers. That is where a business’s promise becomes something a person can test.

A website does not have to contain a checkout to do useful retail work

Not every purchase can sensibly be reduced to selecting a standard item. Some work depends on quantities, measurements, artwork, suitability or a conversation about what is possible.

In those circumstances, the website’s job may be to help a customer reach a useful enquiry. It can show the type of work, explain the relevant choices and make clear what information is needed before an assessment.

That is not a defective imitation of an online shop. It is a different buying process. The appropriate design depends on the work being sold.

A customer considering personalised clothing, for example, may need to establish the garment, quantity, size requirements, artwork and deadline. This is an illustrative buying situation, not a promise of particular stock or production options.

If a page merely says “contact us”, it leaves the customer to guess what to send. If it demands specialist terminology, it transfers too much interpretation to someone who came looking for help.

A useful middle ground is a short explanation of the decisions that matter, accompanied by a clear route to a person when the buyer is unsure. Technology should support that conversation rather than make uncertainty feel like an error.

The shop and the screen should recognise each other

Historical retail formats changed the way information was carried. They also show why consistency matters when information crosses from one setting to another.

A customer should not have to discover that two different descriptions refer to the same offer. A sign, a website and a conversation can use different amounts of detail while still describing one recognisable business.

Consistency does not mean identical layouts. A shopfront is seen at a distance. A product page is inspected more closely. A printed guide can be returned to later. Each needs an arrangement suited to its job.

The aim is continuity of meaning: the customer recognises where they are, understands what is offered and can carry their understanding into the next stage.

One practical test is to follow a single requirement across the business. Find the relevant offer online, imagine the question a first-time buyer would ask, then consider what happens when that person phones or visits. Are the names and expectations still aligned?

This is not a demand for elaborate automation. Sometimes a clearer heading, a useful example or a better instruction will resolve more uncertainty than another interactive feature.

What this history asks businesses to inspect

The catalogue, the self-service aisle, the barcode and the collection point are not one inevitable sequence in which each new invention makes the previous one worthless. They are different arrangements for connecting people, information and goods.

That makes the useful questions surprisingly durable:

• What can the customer decide independently?
• What information makes that decision reliable?
• Where is personal help genuinely useful?
• What does the next action actually confirm?
• Does the handover preserve what the customer understood?

These questions are more demanding than asking whether a business looks modern. A modern-looking experience can still leave people uncertain. An ordinary-looking one can work well if its choices and promises are clear.

They also prevent a false choice between human service and self-service. The customer can be given useful independence without being abandoned. A person can remain available without having to repeat every basic explanation.

The right balance depends on the product and the buyer. The history offers a way to examine that balance, not a universal formula for sales growth.

The real journey was never only from bricks to clicks

A printed catalogue brought choices into the home. A self-service layout brought customers into the process of selecting goods. A barcode linked an item to machine-readable information. A website offered another way to navigate, and a collection point joined a remote decision to a physical handover.

Across those changes, the recurring task was not simply to remove the shopkeeper or replace the building. It was to decide where information, choice and help belonged.

At Time for Designs, our practical interpretation is that the best experience makes those decisions feel straightforward to the customer. The sign helps them recognise the business. The page helps them understand the offer. The conversation helps them resolve what cannot sensibly be decided alone.

If your website leaves people unsure what your business offers or what to prepare before contacting you, see our website design service. Projects are assessed individually around the pages, content, functionality and support required. Call 062 61524 or visit our Cashel shop to discuss what customers need the site to help them do.

The shop did not simply become a website. Retail kept redesigning the customer’s part in the story.