Mitre 10
Mitre 10 is a large player in the Australian Home Improvement and Hardware industry. The Mitre 10 Group is the largest independent wholesaler in the industry whilst also having its own local retail network of 300 stores.
Tradies and consumers are increasingly using digital channels to buy online, but also research products before buying in-store. Having a credible digital presence is therefore critical for any hardware retailer to support its store business.
The Challenge
With a diverse number of products each with individual attributes across the Mitre 10 range and the different levels of capabilities amongst its suppliers to deliver product information, they needed support sourcing up-to-date information from suppliers in order to launch their new digital sales channel.
The information capture process needed to be simple and fast to use, and well-supported to encourage compliance from suppliers. Mitre 10 also required updated content to feed seamlessly into the new website in order to drive online and offline sales.
Our Approach
To deliver on its digital ambitions quickly and effectively, at low cost, Mitre 10 selected SKUlibrary as its product information management (PIM) platform. They also recruited the SKUcapture process to source high-quality product content from its suppliers and minimise the work for their small team.
A data model was configured by Mitre 10’s requirements to enable product enrichment to proceed in parallel with re-developing the site and the integration to Magento. Additionally, with a number of Mitre 10’s suppliers already being clients of SKUlibrary this also provided significant amounts of free product content that could be delivered directly into Mitre 10’s SKUlibrary catalogue.
The Result
Mitre 10 was able to go live with its enhanced ecommerce offering on time, with a more credible range and a lot less stress than is normally the case with such B2C ecommerce projects.
The Mitre 10 teams were also able to focus their efforts on critical project areas of customer experience, platform development and merchandising, rather than chasing product content. With product content enrichment working in parallel with IT development, this was removed as a critical path dependency, avoiding the usual frantic chasing for product content that often accompanies ecommerce projects.
Mitre 10 has delivered a stronger foundation to support its store base with a better customer proposition and give consumers the information they need when buying online and researching for in-store purchase. This helped improve conversions and drive sales across their range.
Mitre 10
Business Unit Manager, Mitre 10
“SKUvantage team have been critical to the success of our ecommerce business. Their easy to use SKUlibrary platform provided a welcome relief from using spreadsheets & shared drives to manage data & images, whilst keeping our product range organised & easy to update. The SKUcapture process has been essential in sourcing product content from suppliers & giving us capacity to source the quantity of product images & data for a successful launch.”