BUILDING A SOLID FRAMEWORK

CUSTOM CALCULATIONS AND DYNAMIC PRICING

Leveraging the Episerver platform, the Guidance team extended the solution to include custom calculations for pricing and shipment lead time. As is typical with a national wholesaler and distributor, HD Supply offers several tiers and types of pricing including national price, market specific price and trader price. Each of these tiered pricing categories is queried based on account and this account driven model ultimately determines the displayed price for each customer and market.

Layered into the backend functionality is real-time pricing which allows accurate and timely pricing calculations. At over 100,000 live SKUs, pricing details at large scale and with multiple tiers is integral to HD Supply. Lead-time shipment calculations leverage geographic location, product weight, product restrictions (i.e. hazmat, oversized, etc) and product availability to perform calculations specific to shipping. All calculations happen behind the scenes and instantaneously as the customer views the products and adds them to their cart.

IMPROVED CHECKOUT PROCESS

Guidance performed a thorough audit of the HD Supply website and this included its checkout process. The checkout experience was lengthy and proved a frustrating user experience. To improve the overall check-out experience, Guidance reduced the number of checkout pages from 3 to 1 single page checkout. This newly designed, frictionless single page checkout experience has greatly enhanced the customer experience and a proven enhancement.

ENHANCED SITE SEARCH

HD Supply’s legacy commerce solution consisted of a sales representative flipping through a catalog of products to fill an order. Each order could take hours to complete! Guidance streamlined the process by implementing Episerver’s advanced site search feature with search suggestions.

Customers can now browse products via the search functionality and the suggestive search feature provides brand, category and product recommendations based on search terms. HD Supply is also able to leverage Index Boosting, which enables product specific boosted results based on different item properties like title, content and summary.

Customers are able to narrow down their search with the intuitive search functionality enabled with find/index weight capabilities. To further aid in the customer’s search for the correct product, the search box provides an auto-complete/suggestions in the results box as the user types in the query as well as showing customized suggested products as the customer begins their search.

GEOLOCATION-BASED DYNAMIC PRICING

Pricing based on the user’s and warehouse geolocation is crucial in this industry. Guidance implemented dynamic pricing rules based on the user’s geolocation in relation to the fulfillment location. Six different pricing models were used based on the user’s geographic location, product availability/stock levels, product restrictions (i.e. hazmat, oversized, etc) and account conditions. The solution also addressed the business requirement to be flexible and incorporate additional pricing models in the future with minimal to no additional development work.

ACCURATE SHIPPING LEAD TIMES

A large portion of “found” revenue was in reducing the shipping penalties due to inaccurate lead times, product weights and dimensions and improperly labeled dangerous materials and thereby accurately calculating shipping cost.

CUSTOMER ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

HD Supply’s customers now have the ability to manage the vendor accounts so that each representative within their organization can isolate the management of their job sites and project lists from the rest of their organization’s universe.

CUSTOM DASHBOARDING CAPABILITIES

In order to visualize the new stream of data, Guidance helped HD Supply build out custom dashboards leveraging Episerver’s Commerce and Content Cloud tool. Guidance extended the Episerver’s Commerce and Content Cloud for custom dashboarding to enable better visibility on data job activities and project logs.

ACCURATE ADDRESS VERIFICATION

Most construction sites are land parcels without an assigned official address. The billing and shipping addresses are contractually bound by the vendors and as such, the shipping addresses for construction sites are pre-populated to avoid error and any potential for fraud.

SUPPLYING MORE THAN PRODUCTS

HD Supply is known as a resource of information in the industry; the website is a reflection of the wealth of resource guides (Knowledge Base) and continued industry updates (Resource Center Blog). The website is more than a wholesale supplier of construction products. By leveraging Episerver’s content management system, it’s also a resource and knowledge base for its users.