Argos’ pilot with online giant eBay, enabling customers of 50 sellers on the marketplace to collect orders from 150 stores, looks inspired.

Argos’ pilot with online giant eBay, enabling customers of 50 sellers on the marketplace to collect orders from 150 stores, looks inspired.

If successful, the arrangement – which runs initially for six months – could be replicated with other businesses.

Argos sceptics believe that the retailer has too many shops and as ecommerce grows all those branches will become an ever-heavier millstone.

But the initiative with eBay could point to an extra purpose for Home Retail-owned Argos stores as an etail distribution point. Argos may benefit too from the extra footfall that the deal may bring.

John Walden, the Argos boss who is the internal front-runner to succeed Terry Duddy as chief executive of Home Retail, has initiated a raft of changes at Argos designed to turn it into a digital leader and performance is on the up.

The transformation has only just begun, but Walden has brought imagination to the task and may turn Argos’ stores into an asset as online sales continue to rise.

If the eBay trial works, all sorts of doors could potentially open. Could Argos even, like WHSmith, open Post Offices in store and carve out a leading position in town centres as a distributor of others’ products as well as a retailer of its own?

Grocers prepare to update

Big grocers Tesco and Sainsbury’s post interims and second-quarter figures respectively next week as grocery competition remains intense.

The latest Kantar figures this week showed JS was the only one of the big four to increase market share in the 12 weeks to September 15 and the grocer was on brokers’ buy lists ahead of the numbers.

Price, while key, is on its own becoming less of a differentiator in middle-market grocery, according to Kantar, so such changes matter. Noticeably, Tesco’s Finest range and Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference are both showing double-digit growth.

While Tesco remains under pressure, the signs are that in the long run changes being made to better connect with consumers could bear fruit. This week’s launch of Hudl and the recent remodelling of the Extra store in Watford show a fresh approach in the all-important domestic market.