New e-commerce platform puts customer first, leading to double-digit sales increase
Maxeda
With 383 stores and more than 7,000 employees, Maxeda DIY Group is the market leader in the do-it-yourself market in the Benelux. Every week, the company helps 1.5 million visitors create the home of their dreams. Maxeda and its store brands Brico (in Belgium and Luxembourg) and Praxis (in the Netherlands) are there for all makers.
Whereas two separate platforms – the 'For the Makers' community and the webshop – used to exist side by side, these have now been integrated into a single space where useful information for DIYers comes together with all the products needed to get a job done. Customers are supported with the entire project, from A to Z.
“Mirabeau worked together with Maxeda and other partners in multidisciplinary agile teams at various locations in Europe to merge the two platforms and ensure that everything fits the needs of the customer,” explains Mirabeau CTO Heini Withagen. “We developed prototypes and a product strategy based on design sprints, and we used user tests to design and prioritize improvements so that the most important problems could be resolved quickly.”
In order to launch new functionalities as quickly as possible, Maxeda uses the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud platform in combination with Hybris 6. Continuous delivery is one of the conditions for a shorter time-to-market. The AWS platform provides the infrastructure needed for a constant development process. The scalability of the platform is also very important: if necessary, additional capacity can be provided to handle traffic during peak hours and promotions. “This cloud solution guarantees that the website always performs to its best,” says Arjan Franzen, Maxeda development lead.
Adding cross-sell options, implementing better navigation and optimizing the check-out process ensures that the new webshop achieves significantly better results. Thanks to the integration into a single digital platform with relevant content that seamlessly fits customers’ experience and needs, there has been an increase in website visits, sales, conversions and transactions compared to last year. The increases have been particularly impressive on mobile, a sign that the website now better meets the needs of today’s consumers.
To find out whether visitors to the new platform were finding what they were looking for and satisfied with the new website, Maxeda joined forces with Braingineers to conduct two user tests with 50 customers each. Interviews and mouse, eye & brain tracking detected a decrease in frustration and increase in the value ‘joy’.
Data-driven future
Maxeda aims to stay at the forefront of the digital do-it-yourself market through continuous innovation and data-driven methods. With the help of Mirabeau, it is currently working on the basis of concept and design experiments, founded on the MVP concept.
There is a huge amount of data available, but there are still many opportunities. “Why not use all the data?” Withagen asks. “We could deploy it not only to respond directly to the needs of the customer and ensure hyper-personalization, but also for inventory management, for instance, based on efficient use of data collected in stores.”
“Over the coming period, we will work together with partners such as Mirabeau to further optimize the new e-commerce environment and increase user-friendliness on the basis of data and insights,” Maxeda Group CIO Erik Cuypers concludes.
Maxeda and Mirabeau are jointly working on a future in which collected data is used to enable retailers to better respond to their customers’ needs.
Want to know more about our work for Maxeda or Retail in general? Contact Serge Kok.
Serge works together with national and international organisations within the Retail industry in a creative way on strategic themes in the digital domain. Get in touch
