Sainsbury’s Multichannel Digital Platform Now Live
Sainsbury’s, the UK’s 3rd largest supermarket, is now fully live with its new multichannel grocery platform, which was developed to provide customers a more intuitive shopping experience.
Sainsbury’s worked with Watford, Hertfordshire, UK-based e-commerce digital agency Salmon to replace its existing platform to help realize its future vision of growing a multichannel offering for its customers spanning store, web, mobile and tablet platforms. The move reflects the increasing importance that Sainsbury’s is placing on technology and digital sales channels.
Salmon has re-platformed Sainsbury’s eCommerce platform from Blue Martini to IBM WebSphere Commerce as well as an additional eight systems to deliver the enhanced and extended customer experience that Sainsbury’s required. Salmon worked closely with the retailer to adopt a strategy that minimized disruption to customers and protected the retailer’s highly regarded online service and brand throughout the roll-out.
The new site has been phased in to customers by region and is now in full operation.
“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,” said Jon Rudoe, digital and technology director of Sainsbury’s. “Customers can look forward to some exciting developments on the horizon.”
Rudoe added: “It’s taken Sainsbury’s 14 years to reach £1 billion ($1.7 billion) in annual sales online and this new platform gives us the capacity to double this. Salmon has been a key partner in helping us transform our digital offer, managing the overall program and more than ten third parties. With ongoing support from Salmon, we look forward to achieving this significant milestone.”
Highlights of the new platform include:
- Improved navigation: search by favorites, special offers, new products, top brands
- Improved recipes: click and add ingredients to trolley
- Favorites: updated quicker as well as offering inspiration
- Data-driven merchandising allowing more personalized offers based on what a shopper puts in their basket
- Call center capability
- Delivery slot booking and van/driver allocation capability
- In-store support tools
- Integration into 225 stores across the UK
- Business data repository supporting 90+ reports
According to Salmon, 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.
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 optimized sites for mobile and tablet are also available for customers that want to shop on those devices. Pages are now rendered in HTML, using User Interface Design best practices with CSS as standard to mirror the same customer experience across browsers.
Click & Collect functionality is currently being piloted by Sainsbury’s to a sub-set of customers who can collect their goods from more than 1,000 stores. In addition, Salmon developed a number of bespoke applications and developed 80 plus integration points to back-end systems and the supply chain to support reporting and Sainsbury’s entire multichannel proposition.
Sainsbury’s operates more than 1,203 supermarkets and convenience stores and employs around 161,000 associates.