3 strategies to keep Officeworks stay ahead of the competition

Amazon is coming to Australia, and a lot of Australian retailers will be impacted. They will need new strategies in order to stay ahead of the game.

I reviewed the Officeworks website and the business value proposition and propose 3 strategies which Officeworks can implement to make a difference.

Internet vs Bricks and Mortar

Amazon is a technology company selling about 400,000,000 products online. It sounds impossible to any retailers, but they have done it with its unique retail/marketplace strategy plus its proprietary A9 Product Search engine to bring convenience, speed and choice to the shopping experience. Amazon has even topped Google as the number one “shopping” search engine.

In Australia, Officeworks is one the of largest retail with 160 stores selling 30,000+ products. Its website concept was designed based on Amazon’s design features, but comparing to Amazon’s technology, it’s still a huge gap. It would take years of constant tweaking and update to have a robust product search algorithm, and it could cost millions to optimise and reengineer its back-end system architecture for speed performance.

What Officeworks can possibly compete on is to improve its existing online shopping experience. They will need to get out of its comfort zone, be agile and build its digital presence where people would talk about. Make the website easy to use, fun to shop, and frictionless to buy.

Strategy 1: Improve the browsing experience

Product findability is key to any e-commerce business — after all, if customers can’t find a product, they can’t buy it.

For that reason, Officeworks will need to optimise the existing navigation experience. The existing category navigation has over 1000 sub-categories over a 4 levels product hierarchy. Users could not browse products until they drill down to the product listings. If users don’t fully understand the product type or attribute implemented as categories, they will get frustrated and abandon the site.

I redesigned the Officeworks product navigation using product filters by categories, essentials, price, brand and colour, etc.

This solved the over-categorisation problem, reduce the number of clicks, and made navigation easier. Users can browse all products available, and filter down their options. As users click through a product, it also behave like a filter on its own by showing related products. It’s a small design change, but can make a difference to the online shopping experience.

Strategy 2: Turn products into experience

People come for the products, and stay for the experience. On the internet Officeworks can’t just compete on price alone, Officeworks will need to get customers involved and engaged. Show people what they can do with the products and build customer loyalty.

Everyone can be an expert at something. Some people like to share, and some people want to learn. If Officeworks can create a platform for people to share their skills and creativity in making crafts or decorating workspace using Officeworks products, then it creates the opportunity to sell products in a bundle.

In this design, customers’ purchase emotions can be triggered by the beautiful wedding invitation card that resonated with them. Let the picture do the selling for you.

Strategy 3: Leverage from the existing ecosystem

Amazon’s online ecosystem is tapping into people’s daily life and it’s difficult to break. Officeworks, Target, Kmart, Coles, and Bunnings are all dominant players in their space, and they are Westfarmers secret weapon. They have a competitive advantage to create one massive eCommerce ecosystem to streamline the online shopping experience to make it an one-stop-shop.

Yes, I know this is easy to say than done. It involves streamlining the product catalogue, the warehousing, the logistics, the digital development team, the database, and create a consistent experience, etc, etc. The point is innovation is very important to stay ahead of the game in today’s digital world.

The future of eCommerce

In the near future there will be be a lot of eCommerce innovation and market consolidation. Retailers will need to reinvent to stay ahead.