A scrub down and a spruce up later, Patrick Morin, the home improvement company’s website was starting to become lucrative: their sales had picked up by 70 percent! Adding a touch of color and changing the floorboard are new renovations that can work at home, but creating a new aesthetic on a website is challenging. Here’s how Patrick Morin became a master of the omnichannel DIY experience: 

How To Spruce Up Your Site: Like Patrick Morin Does Indoors And Online 

Know when your site needs improvement:

Patrick Morin and his wife, Denise Benny started their business in 1960. They put down capital to purchase two sawmills and a small hardware store in a region in Québec, Canada named: Sainte-Marcelline-de-Kildare, Lanaudière. The husband and wife team were known for cultivating relationships in terms of customer service and offering a wide selection of products. Patrick Morin was becoming a name slowly and eventually serviced their products across the whole Québec area. Following 50 years of service, Patrick Morin now operates 21 physical stores, offering Quebecers the finest materials for construction and renovation projects. 

But if you’re living in the 2000s, it’s a long time away from the 60s or even the 90s. Going digital is make or break for any business. Customers, everyone from homeowners to professional contractors have started to migrate to the Internet to find the right products. Patrick Morin needed to adapt and adapt fast. Patrick Morin decided to expand their reach further than their 21 mega-stores, while delivering the same personal experience offered by their 1,400 well-trained employees. They needed to revolutionize their digital operations, but their ‘custom-built’ solution was holding them back. 

So the brand built an omnichannel experience and made themselves a dominant force in home renovation, offline and online. In June 2018, Patrick Morin decided to upgrade to Magento Commerce. Magento Commerce offered Patrick Morin:

• a robust order processing, 
• a great category and attribution features, 
• a seamless cart experience, 
• deep integrations with major technology teams such as Akeneo for product information management (PIM),
• dotdigital for marketing automation to make the platform appealing.

However, Patrick Morin said their decision was largely cemented by the huge community that supports the Magento platform. Patrick Morin’s internal team paired beautifully (like the idea of curtains that are remote controlled) with their colleagues at O2Web, their solution partner, and staying true to the word teamwork, they all set out to build an innovative experience for the future of DIY.

Elise Vaillancourt, Director Marketing, eCommerce and Communications, PatrickMorin.com says: 

“ Thanks to the Magento platform, our team was able to launch a site offering a better user experience and an e-commerce platform that will evolve with the growth of the company.” 

How Omnichannel changed their site:

In June 2018, Patrick Morin decided to upgrade to Magento Commerce with a detailed discovery phase to help O2Web understand Patrick Morin’s rules and requirements. 

Between August to November 2018, they started development, performed user tests, Q/A controls, and finalization. Blending Patrick Morin’s backend systems was easy too. With a custom-made bridge, the Ogasys ERP builts API calls to sync products, customers, orders, prices, promotions, and all the company’s data. Akeneo PIM – through the Pimgento connector, centralized the brand’s product data, creating a single source of truth.

Magento Commerce then assisted Patrick Morin in formulating a superior UX flow, allowing users to search, find, and buy with ease. This was especially noted with their mobile users. It isn’t unusual for a customer to use the information on their phones, and show a product to an employee to ask questions. So the mobile experience had to be intuitive. Patrick Morin formulated a mobile-friendly, responsive site to be a helpful in-store tool, and to assist in ROPO (‘research-online-purchase-offline’ and ‘research-offline-purchase-online’). The brand also needed a number of extensions to improve the customer experience. For example, Smile Retailer for Geotargeting; Amasty Promo, free gift, custom forms; Elasticsearch for advanced product and category search.

Very few industries have the level of classification and categorization as home renovation. Everything between electrical equipment such as lights to wooden planks to plumbing, Patrick Morin’s inventory is not an easy thing to organize. So the pairing of Magento and Akeneo PIM allowed them to build a high-performing user experience. For example, the site intuitively knows a user’s location, and delivers the inventory, prices, offers, and services available to their nearest store.

With Akeneo PIM, Patrick Morin could build, prosper and populate new products faster than before. Compared to prior experiences, they’ve created work and approbation flows to optimize product management. Also, with the dotdigital core bundled extension, they can track, segment, and create actionable automation flows per region and segment. This flexibility saves time and is key to their regional marketing strategies.

Focus on effortless customer experience:

Patrick Morin launched their new platform early on in 2019. When it came to result analysis, the company focused not just on normal KPIs, but those specific to the home renovation industry: 

• When a customer walks into a physical DIY store, they need to find the board that points them towards what they’re looking for. To keep in mind that this has to be done online, Patrick Morin looked at their site visits with and without searches and compared them to 2018. They saw a 26 percent increase in visits with searches, and more importantly, a whopping 31 percent increase in revenues for these visits. Basically, more users are finding what they’re looking for, and even more important, they’re making a purchase.

• Another study revealed a similar success where in Morin has seen an increase in the time spent on the site (+1 minute), more page views (+1.6 pages per session), a lower bounce rate ( -15 percent) and an increase in return visits. 

• The Patrick Morin team experienced higher productivity, with the help of  ERP and PIM integration. All departments benefit from this and no more excel sheets from marketing were being merged with ERP exports. There are currently 27,500 active SKUs on the platform and roughly the same amount of inactive products waiting to be enriched and published. Hence, time management became a viable benefit. 

If you look at the Patrick Morin online website the site has a beautiful set up with a clear message about buying local. In addition to this, their mobile webstore today, is as seamless as their famous in-store experience. By building an organized platform, they allowed customers to walk in and easily find what they’re looking for.  Also, the new streamlined process gives back quality time to the Patrick Morin team, allowing them to focus on new marketing strategies. 

The tremendous online categories in addition to Akeneo’s product rules, allowed Patrick Morin to present departments, promotions, and categories with the same level of clarity as real in-store experiences. Everything has its place, very much like the home you’ve been shopping for.