100%. Remember a lot of retailers have two sides, brick and mortar and online. You essentially need an additional employee on deck to handle the checks (i.e. more money spent) or you use an existing employee which ties up their time and costs you more money because you are potentially serving less customers per hour which means less sales per hour.
Online sales are always running. So when people are making purchases for small items that now require pal verification after hours/closed days as soon as they come into the store someone now has to spend time running all that information vs actually working the floor/counter. God forbid system is down, or there is a typo in how a customer inputted their information - that compounds the time spent.
I've also seen this issue in the brick and mortar store. What used to be in a walk-in-and-pay is now a walk-in-and-wait because you need an attendant to actually run the check.
Presuming your staff are paid $20/hour, those 5 minutes add less than a percent to specific orders, and not to all orders.
You're assuming everything goes smoothly. The amount of times I've personally seen as well as had many lgs tell me how they can't verify a PAL because the buyer doesn't have the right email set up? And that's in person. Imagine going through a list of things from an off-hour online order and now you are going back and forth playing telephone/email tag with a customer.
We aren't saying the verification is the main contributor to the issues stores are having but i think you are understating how much these things can affect your day-to-day when it happens multiple times a day.
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u/GoingBallistik Apr 21 '26
How does checking a PAL increase costs? The time it takes to check it?