Asda’s ecommerce boss has predicted that collection lockers will come to prominence and revealed that improving its mobile site is one of its top priorities.

Gavin Chappell, vice president for supply chain and ecommerce at Asda told the Retail Week Tech and Ecomm Summit: “Lockers will be a big part of the retail landscape because they give customers certainty.”

He said that shoppers like not having to worry about being at home when an order turns up. Lockers also enable customers to shop when they want rather than within store opening hours, said Chappell, who revealed that 37% of Asda’s Sunday collections are picked up outside of its store trading hours.

Click-and-collect also enables consumers to fit shopping around their lives he claimed and quoted figures from a study conducted by Kantar which said that just 31% of people picking up orders have made a journey for that purpose alone.

Improving its mobile site was a top priority for the grocer, said Chappell. “34% of our transactions already touch mobile and we see that pretty much doubling each year,” he said.

“We need to put as much of that customer journey effectively as we can onto our mobile platform. So customers can start their transaction on one device, do another part on another device and may finish it on another and we make it as seamless as possible.”

That involves enabling customers not just to pay but to arrange returns or engage with customer care easily on its mobile site, he said.

Chappell also urged retailers to change their mindset to “where customers are rather than where they are”.

He said retailers should get solutions out in front of shoppers. He used the example of its collection service in its York store, which has proven very popular because of the amount of daytrippers that pick up their picnic food on the way to Scarborough, something Chappell said his team did not predict.