The renovation sector faced many changes over the past few years and the purchase behaviors have evolved dramatically since. Nowadays, online experiences are at the forefront and emphasizing the growing importance of e‑commerce in this industry. Integrating their e‑commerce platform as a key step in the customer journey is the mission Patrick Morin gave us to establish his leading position on the market.
Very few industries have a high level of complexity, regarding categorization and product classifications, as the home renovation sector. From plumbing to carpentry articles, inventories and associated business rules are a real challenge. To be able to develop all the necessary functionalities, whilst centralizing the business rules management, our developers analyzed the information flows and simplified the processes. It’s the creation of a solid foundation based on API connections between Ogasys ERP, Akeneo PIM and the Magento 2 platform that made this system stable and efficient. This infrastructure enables the platform to support a large flow of visitors and the implementation of complex actions such as advanced promotion management, complex shipping rules and deliveries or in-store pick-ups, all while taking the product selection in consideration.
To boost competitiveness, we implemented a hyper-responsive inventory and price update, allowing us to change prices easily and almost in real time. The optimization and centralization of the product information management made it possible to reduce the time spent on operational tasks and to cut staff resources in half.
What home improvement consumers want above all is to quickly find all the products and materials they need, regardless if it’s online or in-store. Therefore, information transparency and inventory availability play a major role. To manage the group’s approximately 27 000 active SKU’s, our developers adjusted the data flow structure and chose Akeneo to handle the product information management.
Our team also worked on the categorization and put the emphasis on the product presentation, allowing to highlight directly and in real time on the PDP pages, the product’s availability, in which store and if it’s possible to have it delivered and / or to pick it up in one of the branches.
The online and in-store experience are closely linked. Both the e‑commerce platform and the handheld in-store experience can serve as a source of research or as a place to buy (ROPO). Our goal was to make both experiences as intuitive as possible. The geolocation has therefore been implemented to automatically associate the user with the nearest store. The customer account was also designed to allow two-way communication, making it easy to find in-store what a customer ordered online and vice versa. The search engine has also been optimized to ease product research, which can now be categorized into popular products, product categories, etc., leaving the possibility for marketing teams to carry out targeted activities.
Finally, the product information on the platform has been designed and enriched in a way to simplify the search and the purchase experience, and enables the consumer to change platform at every step of their journey during their omnichannel experience.