The Partnership That Increased Add-to-Carts by 4% for Maxeda DIY
INDUSTRY
Hardware & DIY
HEADQUARTERS
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
SOLUTIONS
Search, Browse, Recommendations, Merchant Intelligence
Maxeda DIY Group is the largest home improvement retailer in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg with over 300 stores in the region (Praxis, Brico, and BricoPlanit). They’re on a mission to improve product ranges, establish a robust ecommerce presence, and focus on providing top-notch omnichannel experiences.
Maxeda DIY turned to Constructor to initially power Search, Browse, and Recommendations across the regions they service in western Europe. It was also key for our products to adapt to their languages, Dutch and French. Three years later, the partnership is still going strong.
About Maxeda
Maxeda DIY Group is the largest home improvement retailer in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg with over 300 stores in the region (Praxis, Brico, and BricoPlanit). They’re on a mission to improve product ranges, establish a robust ecommerce presence, and focus on providing top-notch omnichannel experiences.
Maxeda DIY turned to Constructor to initially power Search, Browse, and Recommendations across the regions they service in western Europe. It was also key for our products to adapt to their languages, Dutch and French. Three years later, the partnership is still going strong.
Renovating the Customer Experience
Maxeda DIY originally set out to replace their product search and discovery vendor for one that followed MACH principles, allowing them to better keep up with the evolving times. At that time, they were leveraging a dated, monolithic ecommerce platform.
Simultaneously, the team was also unimpressed with the subpar search results their current search solution provided, which caused a poor customer experience even for the most common of queries.
“With our old platform, if a customer searched for a hammer, the search engine returned both hammers and hammer drills,” explains Oleksandra Grafova, Manager Digital at Maxeda DIY Group. “For the customers, that was confusing. With Constructor, it’s not an issue. If you search for a hammer, you get a hammer.”
The subpar product discovery experience spanned across all products on their ecommerce sites, making their team assume more manual work just to ensure results were optimised for the customer experience.
“With the old search engine, if you wanted to create some cross-sell groups or alternatives, you had to do everything manually. All of this combined made us decide it was time to look for a smarter search engine powered by AI that would support our team.”
The Initial Breakthroughs
Since implementation, Constructor has partnered with Maxeda DIY’s merchandisers to show them how to maximise usage of a truly AI-native core — both to advance business metrics and provide the best customer experience.
One of the first breakthroughs happened thanks to Cognitive Embeddings Search (CES). This transformer-based feature is part of Constructor’s Native Commerce Core™. Unlike other vector add-ons, it leverages clickstream to ensure products returned are actually attractive to users, surfacing products for searches where companies don’t have an exact-name match in their assortment to reduce zero results.
This was happening alongside soft content search optimisations, which surface relevant articles and content results for user searches. This synchronisation of results across products and content consolidates the places customers need to go for information, ultimately reducing friction in their shopping experience.
But beyond the initial lifts, the Maxeda DIY team was eventually faced with a need to further improve product rankings. They decided to start A/B testing via one of Constructor’s newest products: Merchant Intelligence.
Test Driving Merchant Intelligence
Merchant Intelligence is an add-on to the Merchant Controls dashboard, arming ecommerce teams with actionable insights and AI-driven predictive analytics that allow them to more easily connect the dots.
“When Constructor launched the A/B testing feature, that was a huge breakthrough for us,” Oleksandra says. “Previously, there was a lot of talk internally about how to improve product rankings even more. We were never able to A/B test rankings. Now we have a whole A/B testing project that’s scheduled until mid-2024. It’s dedicated to help find the best cocktail of rules to provide our customers with the best results.”
A relatively recent project, all of Maxeda DIY’s A/B tests have revolved around how to adequately cater to both of their primary customer groups: online and offline customers. Online customers begin and finish their journeys online, while offline customers check online catalogues but go into stores afterwards to complete their purchase.
“We’re currently working with the Constructor team on developing a single solution that will satisfy the needs of both groups,” Oleksandra says. “Later this year, we want to start personalising rankings based on the customer behaviour and data that we have.”
One such test involved splitting products into groups based on their availability and then creating additional boosting/burying rules to rank products. Their team discovered that Search and Browse surfaced opposite results, which they attributed to the varying behaviours of online and offline customers.
“Offline customers are not going into Browse. They’re just searching,” Oleksandra explains. “If you make such an assumption, the results become logical. These offline customers probably don’t even know the structure of our assortment menu. They’re just checking to see if we have what they want to buy offline and which product will better suit their needs.”
When paired with Constructor’s out-of-the-box functionalities, these A/B tests have helped the Maxeda DIY team gain even more tangible lifts in the business KPIs that matter most to them.
Constructor Results
+10%
in Search CTR
+4%
in Browse CTR
+4%
in add-to-carts
Immediately following activation back in 2020, the Maxeda DIY team saw improvements in key business metrics that matter most to them: +10% in Search CTR, +4% in Browse CTR, and +4% in add-to-carts.
Throughout the years, their team has continually secured additional increases to add-to-carts, revenue, and the other metrics that matter to them. This is thanks to specific proprietary features and solutions within Constructor like Cognitive Embeddings, transformer-based language-understanding, and Merchant Intelligence. Those are paired with regular testing Constructor’s Customer Success and Data Science teams recommend to further optimise Maxeda’s product discovery experience and AI-driven cross-product personalization, where Constructor’s products learn from each other to constantly improve product rankings on a user-level.
Overall, the Maxeda DIY team has been impressed with Constructor’s flexibility and willingness to meet them where they are throughout the partnership.
“We feel that the Constructor team listens to us. They’re ready to do their best to support us in our ideas,” Oleksandra says. “If we see that’s impossible, they’re willing to discuss how we can make it or something similar happen and adjust to our needs. Basically, they’re not closed off to finding a solution. That’s amazing.”
What’s Next for Maxeda DIY
This year has been dedicated more to investigating and steering Maxeda DIY toward a data-driven culture. With products finally ranking better, the Maxeda DIY team is hoping to focus more on architecture updates that can further support customers in their buying journeys.
“We’ve been analysing Google search trends and the behaviour of our customers on our website,” Oleksandra says. “We came to a conclusion that we need to revamp our web categories structure. What we have now on the websites is a historically inherited structure built not from a customer perspective, but from our perspective as Maxeda when we buy from suppliers.”
With these insights in hand, the Maxeda DIY team is equipped to spearhead the development-based phase of their website revamp starting next year. All with the intention to continue providing a top-notch customer experience across the regions they service.
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