Image Credit : Ahold Delhaize & This Place
Project Overview
This Place are a core digital partner to European supermarket group Ahold Delhaize, working to help them achieve their mission of delivering €5 billion in online sales by 2020.
To accomplish this, we needed to build scale across a hugely complex group of individual e-commerce entities, multiple countries, brands, inventories, platforms, and technologies. This involved intimately understanding the logistical limitations, commercial individualities and UX nuances, as well as interpreting success factors for each. As a result, we were able to create a single system to power all.
Selecting SAP Hybris at the core, we built a design-led scalable system that allowed extensive personalisation, highly aligned UX, beautiful interaction, frictionless basket growth and seamless payment.
This work drove a 38% increase in direct traffic, 20% increase in unique users and led to a massive 22% increase in revenue, edging Ahold Delhaize ever closer to their €5 billion target.
Additionally, as a result of our redesign of the registration process conversions increased by 23%, registration time decreased threefold, completion rate improved by 45% and the number of required fields reduced by 60%.
Over 4 million customers now save time, save money and eat better every single day thanks to the platform.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Project Brief
Ahold Delhaize are a leading food retailer with 6,637 stores worldwide and 369,000 employees, serving 50 million satisfied customers a week. Their established and trusted local consumer brands, millions of loyal customers, and dedicated associates make them leaders in their markets. To maintain this position, Ahold Delhaize recognised the need to evolve.
This Place were asked to create an inspiring omni-channel shopping experience, which would be essential to power the next phase of growth and make it simpler than ever for customers to enjoy great value products in a way that fits their lifestyles.
The target was a best-in-class, responsive grocery experience across multiple brands in several countries, with localisation being of utmost importance. Doing so would ensure that modern grocery experience fundamentals would be in place, delivering economies of scale to the group, and reducing the time needed to roll out new functionality across the entire portfolio.
Project Need
Since most of Delhaize’s brands already offered e-commerce across their various platforms, but to varying degrees of maturity and style, we had to define a superset of capabilities, an adaptable master brand style. and then standardize and refine those based on UX/UI best practices.
Additionally, we had to review the registration and checkout processes to help simplify those with the goal of decreasing the time required to complete these steps and ultimately increase conversion rates.
Empowering individual business owners was also important. We wanted the UI tools to offer unparalleled control over page layouts and design.
User Experience
The end delivery was a fully responsive web front-end, designed in a way that allows Delhaize to adapt it to all of their international brands. Mobile-first and adaptable, we devised a true one-click solution for deployment of the experience with localised branding, including fonts, colours, icons, products, customers and content and proposition across all their international brands.
We worked with Delhaize to reduce the number of required fields and to re-evaluate the type of information needed from the user to make an order. Then, we broke down one big registration page into four digestible steps. We also introduced instant form-field feedback to ensure the user knows straight away whether the content they’re putting in, such as passwords and email addresses, is valid or not.
As part of our checkout process review, we removed an entire step by merging the basket page and basket review page into one.
We increased information density because this would be the second time the customer is presented with that information, while also focusing the user’s attention on the essentials, such as the total price and the checkout button.
And lastly, we incorporated an element of data harvesting into the checkout to allow new users who hadn’t entered a delivery address yet to smoothly capture that in the checkout process.
Our responsive front-end code works in perfect harmony with the Hybris Java-based back-end. With this foundation in place, we are iteratively working to deliver the next evolution in omni-channel grocery.
Project Marketing
As this was an internal system, and we’d been sure to bring all the local markets with us on the journey, there was no need for internal promotion – the brands excitedly implemented the new system instantaneously.
Each country rolled out the new site as an update, negating the need for large scale external marketing budgets and benefitting instead from positive word-of-mouth and higher engagement.
Project Privacy
An additional challenge for our designers was to keep the website GDPR-compliant, which encompassed everything from how the information is displayed and collected to whether any boxes are pre-ticked. The ultimate goal was to provide customers with transparency and control of their data. Delhaize’s legal department scrutinised every design that touched on customer data and therefore we had to work very closely with their legal team.
We also designed a state of the art password indicator to ensure that user-created passwords are safe and hard to hack - all while making sure that the process has a minimal impact on the UX. The end result was a dynamic indication of password strength and a system that only accepts passwords of certain complexity.
As our work was focused solely on the front-end, user data and back-end security are all managed internally by Delhaize.
Digital - Retail & Shopping
Digital design that makes our online retail experiences seamless and enjoyable or have that Wow factor is what will stand out here.
More Details