Jaycar InStore

While still in the pilot phase at selected outlets, Jaycar’s unified commerce powered by commercetools has improved the customer experience and reduced costs while allowing the company to trial new capabilities such as AI-powered search and conversational commerce.

Graeme pointed to headless technology as a key selling point and one of the main reasons Jaycar chose commercetools. The ability to own the frontend (which headless provides) was a non-negotiable requirement. “This is important for any brand interacting with customers. For us, it was also about the daily interactions our in-store team has with the frontend. It’s what they live in all day to serve customers.”

With access to top-tier technology, Jaycar’s associates can now seamlessly blend digital tools with the human interactions and expert knowledge that have long defined the company’s in-store customer experience. As an added benefit, they can take these robust selling tools onto the sales floor where the selling should occur, with the customer standing right next to them.

This enables associates to have comprehensive product information previously only available online at their fingertips, allowing them to quickly and easily answer customer questions and provide detailed specifications. If a product is out of stock, they can check store inventory and warehouse availability, place an order and provide customers with delivery timelines.

In addition, they can tap into Algolia’s product recommendations to aid in suggestive selling. This is especially helpful with Jaycar’s less technical customers who often come into the store to purchase items for a project without a clear idea of what’s required to complete it. Graeme pointed out, “It’s also a great way to drive consistent up-sells without the staff training overhead.”

The solution also benefits customers directly by supporting omnichannel shopping. For example, a customer can browse at home and create a cart or project list online. If they come to the store to purchase the items, an associate can quickly pull up their list and convert it into an in-store cart. Customers can also build a cart in-store with an associate, and if they’re not ready to purchase, they can convert the items and save them in an online cart.

Unifying in-store and online commerce also means customers can return items purchased online in-store and convert unreceipted returns into receipted/retrieved returns. They can also have associates confirm their loyalty point status to ensure they take advantage of any available rewards.

Since the backend is one system, all data comes in real-time from stores and online. This ensures that inventory and pricing information is always current so that what customers see online matches what they find in-store.

All of these things were simply impossible to accomplish with legacy in-store technology. It was designed to facilitate sales, not help you sell. commercetools’ solution is designed to enable engagement with the customer from the moment they walk in the door, maximising the sales opportunity.

Unlike Jaycar’s prior technology, its new composable stack is easily extensible and changeable, which means it can keep up with the changing needs of its teams and customers. “Before we were relying on some big software company to make small screen changes and they couldn’t make it happen or it would take months. This is the sort of thing that made us want to go headless in the first place.”

Case in point: Graeme mentioned the company is starting to sell installation services, which require integrating a booking system for appointments. “This is going to be easy to do now — and if I have another good idea I want to implement next week, I can do it — because of the composability of commercetools.”