Online Apple store buyers looking to pay for, then pick up an item in person at a nearby Apple retail store now have that option at some of the company's locations.
Following an outage of Apple's online store in the U.S. last night, the company quietly rolled out a new feature that lets buyers choose a local retail store to get that items from. That includes Apple's own products and those from third-parties, some of which may not be stocked in an Apple retail store.
The feature, which the blog Macrumors tipped earlier this week, is not available in all stores. A quick check with multiple products in cities like New York, Seattle, Los Angeles shows the feature as unavailable, whereas it's up and running in three of Apple's stores in San Francisco.
Other retailers have long offered in-store pickup as an incentive to avoid shipping costs and to let customers get their hands on hot gadgets faster. In the U.S., that includes companies like Sears, Nordstrom, and Best Buy.
In Apple's case, it offers free shipping on items over $50 from its online store, making the option of worth for lower-priced items and custom computer orders, the latter of which buyers might want to have instruction on with Apple's personal setup service.