How Patrick Morin Created an Omnichannel DIY Experience
The home improvement company renovated its eCommerce website and increased conversion by 70 percent.
eCommerce — Wholesale, Industrial & Commercial
Their DIY site needed improvement
In 1960, Patrick Morin and his wife, Denise Benny, acquired two sawmills and a small hardware store in Sainte-Marcelline-de-Kildare, Lanaudière — a region in Québec, Canada. Thanks to the company’s fantastic customer service and wide selection of products, the Morin brand soon became popular across the whole Québec area. After 50 years of service, Patrick Morin now operates 21 physical stores, offering Quebecers the finest materials for construction and renovation projects. As the digital revolution gathered momentum, their customers — everyone from homeowners to professional contractors — started to migrate to the Internet to find the right tool. They needed to adapt.
Patrick Morin decided to expand their reach further than their 21 mega-stores, while delivering the same personal experience offered by their 1,400 well-trained employees. They needed to revolutionize their digital operations, but their ‘custom-built’ solution was holding them back. Patrick Morin wanted to build an omnichannel experience and make the brand an authority in home renovation, offline and online. In June 2018, they made the decision to upgrade to Magento Commerce.
Magento Commerce offered robust order processing, great category and attribution features, and a seamless cart experience. Deep integrations with major technology partners like Akeneo for product information management (PIM) and dotdigital for marketing automation made the platform appealing, too. But Patrick Morin said their decision was cemented by the huge community that supports the Magento platform. Patrick Morin’s internal team joined with their colleagues at O2Web, their solution partner, and in true teamwork fashion, set out to create an innovative experience for the future of DIY.
Thanks to the Magento platform, our team was able to launch a site offering a better user experience and an e-commerce platform that will evolve with the growth of the company.
Elise Vaillancourt
Director Marketing, eCommerce and Communications, PatrickMorin.com
Omnichannel was the answer
The project started in June 2018, with a detailed discovery phase to help O2Web understand Patrick Morin’s rules and requirements. From August to November 2018, they started development, performed user tests, Q/A controls, and finalization. Integrating Patrick Morin’s backend systems was easy. With a custom-made bridge, the Ogasys ERP uses API calls to sync products, prices, promotions, customers, orders, and all the company’s data. Akeneo PIM — through the Pimgento connector, centralized the brand’s product data, creating a single source of truth.
Magento Commerce helped Patrick Morin create a superior UX flow, allowing users to search, find, and buy with ease. This was especially true with their mobile users. It isn’t unusual for a customer to use the information on their phones, and show a product to an employee to ask questions. So the mobile experience had to be intuitive. Patrick Morin created a mobile-friendly, responsive site to serve as a helpful in-store tool, and to power ROPO (‘research-online-purchase-offline’ and ‘research-offline-purchase-online’). Patrick Morin also added a number of extensions to improve the customer experience: Smile Retailer for Geotargeting; Amasty Promo, free gift, custom forms; Elasticsearch for advanced product and category search.
Very few industries have the level of classification and categorization as home renovation. From plumbing to electrical equipment to wooden planks and patio sets, Patrick Morin’s inventory is a challenge in itself. The combination of Magento and Akeneo PIM allowed them to build a high-performing user experience. For example, the site intuitively knows a user’s location, and delivers the inventory, prices, offers, and services available to their nearest store.
With Akeneo PIM, Patrick Morin can create, enrich, and populate new products faster than ever. They’ve created work and approbation flows to optimize product management, and save time. Also, with the dotdigital core bundled extension, they can track, segment, and create actionable automation flows per region and segment. This flexibility is key to their regional marketing strategies.
A seamless customer experience
Patrick Morin launched their new platform in January 2019. To analyze their results, the company looked not only at normal KPIs, but those specific to the home renovation industry. For example, when a customer walks into a physical DIY store, they need to find what they’re looking for. This is also true online. Patrick Morin looked at visits with and without searches and compared them to 2018. They saw a 26 percent increase in visits with searches, and more importantly, a whopping 31 percent increase in revenues for these visits. In summary: more users are finding what they’re looking for, and most importantly, they’re making a purchase.
Other data revealed a similar success story. Patrick Morin has seen an increase in the time spent on the site (+1 minute), more page views (+1.6 pages per session), a lower bounce rate ( -15 percent) and an increase in return visits. The Patrick Morin team experienced higher productivity, thanks to the ERP and PIM integration. All departments benefit from this, as all information is always up to date, exportable, and most importantly, providing a single source of truth. No more excel sheets from marketing being merged with ERP exports. There are currently 27,500 active SKUs on the platform and roughly the same amount of inactive products waiting to be enriched and published. Imagine the time saved.
Today, the Patrick Morin mobile website is as seamless as their famous in-store experience. The megastores are organized to allow customers to walk in and easily find what they’re looking for. The powerful online category features, coupled with Akeneo’s product rules allowed Patrick Morin to present departments, promotions, and categories with the same level of clarity and intuition as the in-store experience. And this new, streamlined process gives back quality time to the Patrick Morin team, allowing them to focus on new marketing strategies.
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Originally published at https://magento.com.
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