Leroy Merlin Italia: The customer’s journey towards the house of their dreams starts with Woosmap Store Locator

Leroy Merlin Italia uses geolocation to show customers the nearest store and the in-store availability of products viewed online.

“Our customers are anyone who owns a house or a commercial premises”, or “Italians in general”, explains Luigi Cuviello, Digital Marketing Manager at Leroy Merlin Italia. The company’s leadership mission is: “to become a national point of reference for anyone who wishes to build the house or business of their dreams”.

“We start from the assumption that every Italian has a right to his or her perfect home”. For Cuviello, this vision is translated into the sale of solutions (rather than products) which may not necessarily satisfy the needs of the customer on their own. There are various levels of DIY, since there are plenty of customers who have no wish to do literally everything themselves. Therefore, if a customer needs an air-conditioned home/work location, the solution will not simply be the air conditioning unit, but the entire 360° experience: starting with the delivery and the installation, and finishing with the equipment maintenance. “This is how we differentiate ourselves from traditional retailers”.

Rethinking Web-to-Store: geolocation at the heart of the Leroy Merlin Italia’s strategy

By ensuring supplies for key industries, DIY is one of the sectors that managed to keep going through lockdown. However, it was essential to indicate that stores were open and provide the necessary access conditions. Woosmap Store Locator Widget made it possible to integrate geolocation services into the Leroy Merlin Italia’s website, ensuring maximum efficiency for both the company and its consumers. In fact, not only Woosmap Store Locator Widget does provide the information requested by the customer in just a few clicks, but the plug & play nature of the widget enables its rapid implementation even on pre-existing websites.

This enabled the management to update a non-optimised platform swiftly, at no extra cost for the IT department and without disrupting its internal processes.

Cuviello believes that geolocation is becoming fundamental in Web-to-Store strategies because of two convergent factors. On the one hand, digital technologies have become common in people’s lifestyles and their behaviors and the other hand, the COVID-19 crisis outlined them as a solution for overcoming the constraints of the lockdown. “Many people weren’t particularly attached to the concept of online shopping and have been forced to become so”. In order to meet the sudden surge in demand, e-commerce sectors have also been forced to reinvent themselves. “Our task was to put ourselves in a position to ride out this spike and ensure continuous growth”. Therefore, the crisis challenged the company to generate synergy between the physical network of retailers and the boom in the digital traffic. “We were looking for a solution that created a fluid and comprehensive search experience, irrespective of the device used. We found this solution in Woosmap and in particular in the Woosmap Store Locator Widget. The displayed information in all the web channels enabled users to continue to visit physical retailers, thus increasing our business”.

a complete technical assistance, in Italian

Cuviello underlines the speed and the reliability of the WGS support, and the advantage of technical assistance in Italian, which has enabled the IT department to ask for and receive help much more directly. WGS guided Leroy Merlin Italia throughout the development and the validation of the Woosmap services. It also provided solutions to optimise processes like calculating the distances between geographical points, to ensure optimal management of new spikes in traffic, such as during the lockdown.

Speaking of the future, Cuviello has a clear vision. The objective is to consolidate their leadership position through increasingly multi-channel procedures, “therefore not only or simply as a physical store but also as a digital business, ensuring our customers are at the heart of everything we do and that we can be found where they need us”. As for the role of geolocation: “it lies at the heart of our business,” Cuviello concludes, “and will remain a key aspect in all sectors that are unable to function without the physical store environment”.