LARGEST ONLINE GROCERY COMMERCE RE-PLATFORM PROJECT GLOBALLY, MEASURED BY ANNUAL SALES
Sainsbury’s, the UK’s 3rd largest supermarket, was founded in 1869 and today operates over 1,203 supermarkets and convenience stores and employs around 161,000 colleagues.
The retailer puts its customers at the heart of everything they do and have invested in stores, colleagues and channels to deliver the best possible shopping experience. Their strong culture and values are part of their identity and are integral to their success.
Sainsbury’s future vision is to grow a multichannel offering for their customers that spans store, web, mobile and tablet. The move reflects the increasing importance that Sainsbury's are placing on technology and digital sales channels.
With Sainsbury’s annual online grocery sales already in excess of £1 billion, this project was heralded as the largest grocery re-platform programme globally - based on revenue.
The new platform provides Sainsbury's customers with a truly connected experience, with data shared across channels whether it's come from in-store, online or mobile. This helps Sainsbury's to understand what customers are buying and when, enabling the retailer to tailor offers and rewards unique to individual customers. All of this supports Sainsbury's commitment to offering great service and fantastic products.
Using data to improve the customer experience
Highlights of the new platform
Improved navigation – search by favourites, special offers, new products, top brands
Improved recipes – click and add ingredients to trolley
Favourites – updated quicker as well as offering inspiration
Data-driven merchandising allowing more personalised offers based on what a shopper puts in their basket
Delivery slot booking and van/driver allocation capability
Integration into 225 stores across the UK
Business data repository supporting +90 reports
The functionality is vast and continuing to grow, with some interesting grocery features. A new floating trolley allows customers to scroll down their shopping list, multi-faceted navigation allows customers to sort by brand and type, ratings and reviews are available for products and recipes and a richer customer experience is supported with great imagery and video.
Technically challenging, the site includes support for thousands of simultaneous promotions (calculated real-time in the basket) and a single customer view for Grocery and General Merchandise.
New optimised sites for mobile and tablet are also available for customers that want to shop on those devices.
Click & Collect functionality is currently being trialled by Sainsbury's to a sub-set of customers who can collect their goods from more than 1,000 stores.
To achieve their vision, Sainsbury's replaced their existing platform with a new multichannel grocery platform to offer customers an even better, smarter and more intuitive shopping experience.
An enhanced customer experience
We re-platformed Sainsbury's eCommerce platform, from Blue Martini to IBM WebSphere Commerce, as well as an additional eight systems. All systems deliver the enhanced and extended customer experience that Sainsbury's required. Crucially, we worked closely with the retailer to adopt a strategy that minimised disruption to customers and protected the retailer's highly regarded online service and brand throughout the roll-out.
Jon Rudoe, Digital and Technology Director, Sainsbury’s said:
"Much of the work by Salmon has focused on improvements "behind the screen" to allow us to build new and exciting functionality that will make the shopping experience better, faster and more efficient for our customers. Customers can look forward to some exciting developments on the horizon."
Neil Stewart, CEO at Salmon said:
"This programme marks a landmark for Salmon; it's one of the first and largest grocery implementations on IBM WebSphere Commerce anywhere in the world. Technically challenging - taking into consideration the performance implications of the large number of items in the average shopping trolley, the sheer abundance and complexity of grocery promotions, tight coupling to legacy systems and data migration of 8 million customer accounts, 4 million credit cards and 12 million orders - by any standards the launch has been a resounding success."