Electrolux - Selling directly to consumers for the first time

Enabling one of the world’s largest appliance manufacturers to sell directly to consumers for the first time

The background

Looking to own and build long-term customer relationships

Electrolux is the second-largest appliance manufacturer in the world, with sales revenues of $15bn annually. Zone has worked with Electrolux as its lead digital partner in EMEA for the past eight years, helping to advance its digital capabilities and improve its organisational agility and culture.

Electrolux had always sold their products via third-party retailers such as John Lewis and ao.com, with customers offered a fragmented experience with numerous Electrolux-owned interfaces. So, in order to boost sales and build and own long-term customer relationships, Electrolux wanted to develop a single flagship store where they could sell to consumers directly.

In August 2019 Zone was tasked with creating an exceptional brand and consumer experience, with best practice e-commerce capabilities to help consumers find and purchase appliances, spare parts, accessories and consumables.

Titled the D2C Transformer initiative, Zone worked alongside Cognizant to enhance Electrolux’s digital capabilities by rolling out a new integrated solution to two European countries before a global launch.

The challenge

Finding the right technical solution to support a new business model

Electrolux was already well aware that digital enables growth, and had many digital touchpoints across its brands where consumers were able to browse its products.

The ambition was to enhance awareness, engagement and consideration for Electrolux’s strategic brands. It needed to drive cost-effective visibility and targeting to maximise sales conversion through a single online store that complements its retailer partnerships.

This new way of selling required an innovative technology solution to support this new business model.

Zone looked to consolidate the brand experience by exploiting the incumbent content management system, powered by Episerver, to be the front-end interface of the platform, integrated with the capabilities of SAP Cloud Commerce CCV2 (formerly SAP Hybris) as the e-commerce engine.

Core features include:

- Full commerce journey, from product search, display and selection through to basket, checkout, delivery and confirmation

- Multi-country site model

- Country-specific catalogue, pricing and supported payments achieved using single Base store configuration

- Customer groups are maintained separately for each country

- A product can have maximum of 3 types of prices – RRP, D2C Price, Discounted price (from promotion)

- Price per product per country - Prices would be loaded against country specific customer groups

The outcome

Delivering a slick e-commerce platform for a global leader’s brands in all markets

Having worked with Electrolux for a number of years, Zone had established great ways of working across multi-disciplinary teams and time zones. Different stakeholders are able to be directly involved to deliver solutions that create real value for the business quickly.

Using our offshore team in India and nearshore teams in the UK, Bucharest, Italy and Germany, we were able to effectively work with key stakeholders in Electrolux’s HQ in Stockholm. Over the course of seven sprints we delivered an innovative e-commerce solution, adaptable for all markets and brands in which Electrolux operates.

Scrum was at the heart of our methodology, where user stories based on initial requirements were prioritised into a backlog and delivered against agreed acceptance criteria. An effective change management process allowed us to analyse and accommodate extra scope, when feasible, without disrupting the project delivery.

Electrolux now has sites live in Germany (https://www.aeg.de/) and Italy (https://www.electrolux.it/) that enable consumers to easily browse and purchase market-leading products from its extensive catalogue. Furthermore, back-end users can easily retrieve product information and price lists from a variety of integrated sources and APIs and update information on the fly.

In the first two weeks since launch, over €25,000 in revenue was generated through the new platform – a huge milestone for a company that typically doesn’t sell major appliances direct to customers. With a very successful launch in Europe, the modern and intuitive platform will continue to be enhanced by Zone and rolled out globally in the coming phases.