Since their founding in 1923, Leroy Merlin has achieved to become the leader of the DIY market in Europe and one the global actors in their field. The French company has a turnover of over 7 billion euros and hires over 30,000 people in France, but also looks to improve their customer journeys within their many stores. As one of the forerunners in innovation, Leroy Merlin started a partnership with Amoobi in 2021 in order to do so.

In three years partnering with them, Leroy Merlin has extended the use of Amoobi’s services to a second store and might expand it further in the future. So far, Amoobi has already proven to be useful to challenge what Leroy Merlin thought their customer journeys were and to help with the understanding of the actual behavior of their customers. 

With data provided by Amoobi through an in-store, GDPR-compliant customer-tracking technology, the leaders of do-it-yourself learned how to trust external recommendations and apply them to forge a new customer journey.

Progressing in the Dark

With the rise in importance of data in daily business, something became quite clear for Leroy Merlin three years ago. Unlike online sales which provide a lot of data on the customer journey and, therefore, on how it could be improved and instill a turnover increase, in-store sales just don’t work that way. Actually, it meant that, back then, Leroy Merlin could only track 5% of its turnover, as 95% still depended on in-store sales. In other words, they were progressing in the dark. 

« Like any company, when you don’t have data, decisions are made a lot by intuition or based on experience. (…) And intuition is interesting, it is still as important, but it is interesting to confront it with data ». Dominique Monfort, National Sales Manager, Leroy Merlin

That’s where their talks one year earlier with Amoobi came to plant the seed for a future, fruitful partnership. With initial talks starting deep into the COVID-19 pandemic, Leroy Merlin started to consider the necessity to gain more data within stores and found in Amoobi a company with a proven know-how. The proximity between Leroy Merlin’s headquarters in Lille, France and those of the Belgian company made it the perfect match in their search for a data-collecting tool. 

And Here Comes the Light

With Amoobi, Leroy Merlin found just the answer they needed for their lingering question: How could they analyze their customer journeys within the store?

“Amoobi allows you to record 100% of the customer journeys that come into the store with an accuracy close to, let’s say, 10 centimeters. For 100% of the customers who come into the store, we will know precisely – like online with your mouse – what they do, the time they spend, the interactions they can have with a department, the path they take, or the number of times they will go down such an aisle, such a path.“ Dominique Monfort, National Sales Manager, Leroy Merlin

This incredible precision came to be only one of the factors which enlightened Amoobi as the perfect solution. Another one to stand out was it’s completely GDPR compliant, as the system doesn’t identify the clients by name, but picture them as little dots in the system while also removing employees from the analysis. Those features aligned with the strong values of Leroy Merlin in a world driven by the big data. 

Forging a New Understanding

Once Leroy Merlin got their hand on the first data from their pilot store, they were not ready for the first conclusions. 

“We used to believe our DIY store customers came to browse, spend time in the inspiration areas like they would in a mall, but our first data showed an average visit time of 14 minutes and 35 seconds.“ Dominique Monfort, National Sales Manager, Leroy Merlin

The data collected by Amoobi challenged the way the company considered their customer journeys. As the initial thought was to make the journey longer so that the customer could buy more, it actually turned counter-productive. With the help of Amoobi’s expertise and powerful tool ASK, the way Leroy Merlin thinks their category management and merchandising evolved to become more precise and data-driven. 

The New Customer Journey

With the data in mind, Leroy Merlin changed their floor planning to optimize the customer journey through the store. This was made through several improvements:

• A space optimization for products within a section, often resulting in a 7 to 8% transformation rate;
• A more advanced space planning, in order to create new pathways and more direct journeys for the customer according to what they want in the store, such as shortcuts and express itineraries;
• A detection of the categories of products that generate the most requests and interactions with collaborators, allowing to correct potential problems or improve the merchandising of a category of products;
• A comparison with online customer journeys to apply similar improvements on in-store journeys.

The use of data in their store also helped Leroy Merlin prioritize some products in their category management.

“Thanks to Amoobi, we identified the categories that attract the most visitors and where we must maintain the shelves daily. Instead of trying to keep all 50 categories in perfect order, we focus on about 15, which impact the overall conversion rate significantly and should be maintained from Monday to Saturday.“ Dominique Monfort, National Sales Manager, Leroy Merlin

The Expansion

The reality of one store is sometimes not the reality of all. That’s why, after their satisfaction with Amoobi in a first store, Leroy Merlin expanded their partnership to a second store. 

The first reason for a second store was to be able to challenge results between stores. By doing so, they realized a lot of results were actually similar in both stores and they took those lessons to another level by implementing those conclusions into the floor planning of an all-new store they opened recently. 

With a second store also comes a bigger testing capacity, which Leroy Merlin found really useful for A/B tests, with one store doing the A test and the other the B test, for example. The data provided by Amoobi also helps with the detection of any problem in the space planning in a store.

“We’re working in a 10,000m² store. With Amoobi, I can pinpoint where I should go to make the most improvements in the store. It saves a lot of time.“ Dominique Monfort, National Sales Manager, Leroy Merlin

Taking note of similar results in both stores also allows Leroy Merlin to run different tests in those. The company decided to run five major tests in one store and five others in the second one, therefore doubling test possibilities and decreasing the time between tests. 

Building the Future

The use of Amoobi changed the way Leroy Merlin works with their category management and floor planning, after challenging their belief of how customers were behaving in their stores. With customers and collaborators at the heart of their activities, their partnership with Amoobi was the tool they were waiting for. 

“At Leroy Merlin, our aim is to improve the customer journey, making it as fast and effective as possible. That’s what we mean. Revenue is indeed a result of what we’ve put in place, not the other way around. That’s why it’s essential to highlight that Amoobi is great because it allows us to understand our clients, to provide answers to them, to know how we’re going to proceed.“ Dominique Monfort, National Sales Manager, Leroy Merlin

Now, Leroy Merlin is looking ahead to new challenges and new improvements to tackle with the help of Amoobi’s data. An extension of the partnership to a third store in a larger city, or even beyond the French borders, is in the works. As a forerunner in the DIY market for a century, Leroy Merlin continues to build the future.

Click here to download the whitepaper.

Click here to download the whitepaper.

Click here to download the whitepaper.

Every industry has buzzwords. While some buzzwords are industry-specific, there are some words and phrases any person working in a twenty-first century corporate environment will recognize:

“Let’s circle back on this.”

“We should take this offline.”

“This is great for visibility.”

However, there is one buzzword that everyone in retail has heard at least one time or another; one that has been said at every board meeting, VC funding round, and company retreat since the rise of ecommerce:

“Omnichannel.”

Omnichannel strategy, by definition, is the strategy related to integrating the shopper experience so it’s optimized between all touch points (website, app, store, etc.). This could be something as simple as an in-store loyalty program that can be accessed from a cellphone, or as complex as a phone application giving a shopper custom advice as they wander through a brick-and-mortar location.

One significant way omnichannel has become more present in retail is through the integration of the online shopping experience and the brick-and-mortar one. But why should they be integrated? As ecommerce becomes more important to everyday shopping behavior (something the COVID-19 pandemic solidified), the question comes naturally: is brick and mortar still relevant?

No one can predict the future, but the numbers indicate that while the rise of ecommerce may negatively impact some brick-and-mortar retailers, it will not stop the act of shopping in real life. Walmart still remains at the top of the Fortune Global 500, as does Amazon. And while Amazon is primarily an ecommerce player, both organizations are continuing to further their ventures into the omnichannel space.

Amazon is continuing its rollout of Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, allowing for a contactless walk-in walk-out experience, in both large and small formats. Walmart has put almost $1.2 billion into its ecommerce program and continues to utilize its vast store and supply chain network to make the connection between stores and online seamless. Ventures such as Online Grocery Pickup (OGP), Pickup Today, and geo-fencing (a technology that notifies the store when a specific customer is in the parking lot) show the strides Walmart is making in its competition with Amazon. Both retail giants are showing a solid commitment to pushing the omnichannel boundary. But while these technological advancements provide huge benefits to the customer, can they also provide benefits to the retailers themselves?

Yes: through data. Amazon, Walmart, and every other major retail player are constantly collecting customer data. In doing so, they are solidifying their ability to map out the experience customers have online and in-store. Ecommerce retailers already have an almost exact view of how their customers are shopping, from start to finish. I’ve seen it firsthand: I started my retail career as a buyer in Walmart’s ecommerce division and was constantly floored by the sheer amount of information I had access to. There is an endless breadth of data available to ecommerce merchants: exactly how long customers spend on the product display pages of top sellers; how long customers spend on a page before they exit; what products are getting viewed but are not converting. It’s an almost limitless analytical experience, and one that is very difficult to replicate in a brick-and-mortar environment.

Or is it?

While major players in the space are focused on making sure the distinction between online and stores becomes a blurred line, there are other players who continue to focus on data-driven solutions. Though it won’t help in the traditional “omnichannel mission,” as it were, it will help put the two platforms on even footing. Brick and mortar retailers need to begin thinking more deeply about the technology available to them, and stop believing that generic industry reports will help them make the right decisions. Companies like Focal Systems seek to eliminate the lack of real-time insight into out of stocks; companies like Amoobi seek to eliminate the uncertainty around what customers are actually doing on the store floor. The resources are there; companies just need to seek them. The omnichannel solution is easier to implement when you have a clear understanding of behavior on all sides of the equation, and that knowledge exists for the taking.

The buzzword “omnichannel” is here to stay, with every competitive retailer adopting some strategy related to it; however, a solid omnichannel strategy does not guarantee structured decision making. Until retailers approach their shopper behavior from a specific, analytical point of view, the information they base their decisions on will always be limited. The world is changing fast, and every retailer needs to ensure they are equipped with the correct tools to change right along with it.

Xovis has recently published one of our use cases that shows how much value can be generated with customers analytics at category level. In this case study, we show how we helped a home improvement retailer generate significant sales uplift by re-thinking the endcap at the entrance of the category. We also show how much value was gained thanks to the in-store analytics of Amoobi

Check it out!

https://www.xovis.com/insights/detail/optimizing-merchandising-with-subcategory-analytics