hybris + Galeries Lafayette = Fashion Forward
The iconic French department store gets a
modern makeover
Company: The historic Galeries Lafayette, an international,
high-end department store based in Paris, with locations
throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Challenge: Develop a sophisticated omni-channel solution that
fits the brand’s high standards to increase online sales revenue.
Solution: hybris Commerce Accelerator with PCM and
Customer Service Module.
Results: A compelling, omni-channel shopping experience
that can handle even the highest of traffic loads.
Based in Paris, the upscale Galeries Lafayette is
one of the largest department stores in Europe.
There are currently 60 locations within France, and
a growing number outside the flagship country (including stores in China, Indonesia, Dubai, Morocco
and Berlin). The company’s business is mostly instore (they earned €2.8 Billion in revenue in 2012,
with only 3% of that being from online sales), but
they are currently undergoing efforts to bring in
more sales online. When their first website launched in 2008, Galeries Lafayette wasn’t sure how
much time, money or energy they wanted to invest
in building out e-commerce stores for their various
locations. However, in 2010 they were prompted by
shareholders to accelerate their e-commerce initiative – the retail world was online, and they needed
to be too.
hybris + Galeries Lafayette = Fashion Forward: The iconic French department store gets a modern makeover
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The Challenge: A Passé Platform
As efforts to go online started ramping up, it became clear that
Galeries Lafayette was not equipped to create a sophisticated
digital experience: they lacked the tools and the expertise they
needed. At that point, they moved e-commerce from marketing to
its own independent business unit within the company. They hired
people with digital expertise, and looked to change their tools,
namely, their platform.
The platform they had been running on was inefficient, and
causing major setbacks in online performance. It was unable to
handle peaks in traffic, integrating new products was difficult and
inefficient, and the whole e-commerce platform needed to be shut
down for several hours each night in order to update the catalog.
“We didn’t have the processes, and we didn’t have the tools to
implement the processes,” said Alexandre Aubry, CIO at Groupe
Galeries Lafayette. “We had to change just about everything in
order to actually operate as a fully-functional commerce site.”
In 2011, they began scouting out a new platform for their site. “It
became clear early on in the processes that for us, e-commerce
was not the goal,” Aubry explained. “Of course, we needed to build
an e-commerce site, but the goal was for Galeries Lafayette the
brand, to have a fully-integrated, omni-channel operation.” To do
this, they needed a platform that could grow and scale based on
the business, that could offer a high quality experience across all
channels, and that could localize to different countries worldwide.
The Solution: Go Haute with hybris
Due to the lack of functionality of their site, Galeries Lafayette
opted for a completely new platform to move forward. After careful
consideration, Galeries Lafayette selected hybris as their new
commerce platform at the end of 2011. They found hybris to have all
the capabilities needed to reach their omni-channel goals, with the
most state-of-the-art solutions. The out-of-the-box omni-channel
and internationalization features met the needs of the brand and its
business plans.
They implemented the hybris Commerce Accelerator, which gave
them a good starting point to get set up and running quickly, then they
focused on customization to suit their business and brand needs.
hybris’ Product Content Management (PCM) system centralized their
product data, streamlining back-end efforts and taking them far
beyond the capabilities of their previous platform. Galeries Lafayette
also utilized hybris’ Customer Service solutions. As a brand known
for listening and responding to their customers’ needs, being able to
quickly and easily assist users was key. The Customer Service
Cockpit pulls customer data together in one place, allowing customer
service agents to serve their clients’ needs regardless of channel.
The implementation, which was conducted with hybris partner
Keyrus, took a total of nine months, launching in mid-2012. They
updated the French website first with plans to go international in the
coming years.
The Results: Très Chic Shopping
Since launching the new omni-channel experience, Galeries
Lafayette’s French site has experienced exponential traffic growth.
They went from having 11 million unique visitors in 2011 to 40 million
in 2013. “Before,” said Aubry, “we were probably the only online store
praying not to have too much traffic, because the site couldn’t handle
it. Once we launched on the hybris platform in the summer of 2012,
we wanted to get as much traffic as possible, and the site did not fail.
It perfectly handled all the traffic, all the orders; it was like a dream.”
hybris + Galeries Lafayette = Fashion Forward: The iconic French department store gets a modern makeover
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The store now runs online-exclusive promotions and sales and
offers a seamless omni-channel shopping experience, and,
according to Aubry, customers have also been making use of the
new omni-channel services, such as buy online pick up in-store.
“Every functionality we bring to them, they are using. They use the
website as a tool to prepare to shop in-store. They go online and
check the brands in the store, check the hours, the products; they
want to see online what’s in the store.”
Since the launch, customers have also been branching out and
integrating their shopping habits. Customers who were once
in-store-only shoppers are buying online, and customers who
started out online-only are coming to the store for the full experience. Plus, they are buying more on a regular basis.
Galeries Lafayette is also working on streamlining their CRM by
consolidating their previously silo’d customer databases. This
allows them to more consistently and effectively communicate with
shoppers.
The Future:
Looking to Next Season
Immediate next steps include going global and developing e-commerce sites for their various international markets (particularly in
Asia), while continuing to expand. They are also looking to take full
advantage of hybris’ product offering by bringing the online experience in-store, enabling sales personnel with the latest digital tools to
enhance the shopping experience.
“There were a lot of key days when we were selecting a platform,”
recalls Aubry. “A year and a half later [after deciding on hybris], we
made the right choice. It was the right choice for the company, it
was the right choice at the time, and it’s still the right choice. The
challenges ahead are to update the experience so we can get more
out of the product and create a visionary omni-channel experience
for our customers.”
Honestly, it’s not especially visionary, we just listen to the
customers and do what they want. And what the customer wants
today is to be able to buy from any channel, to interact with any
channel, and to still be able to be recognized as a Galeries
Lafayette customer.”
Alexandre Aubry, CIO at Groupe Galeries Lafayette
About hybris software
hybris software, an SAP Company, helps businesses around the globe sell more goods, services and digital content through every touchpoint, channel and device.
hybris delivers OmniCommerce™: state-of-the-art master data management for commerce and unified commerce processes that give a business a single view
of its customers, products and orders, and its customers a single view of the business. hybris’ omni-channel software is built on a single platform, based on open
standards, that is agile to support limitless innovation, efficient to drive the best TCO, and scalable and extensible to be the last commerce platform companies
will ever need. Both principal industry analyst firms rank hybris as a “leader” and list its commerce platform among the top two or three in the market. The same
software is available on-premise, on-demand and managed hosted, giving merchants of all sizes maximum flexibility. Over 500 companies have chosen hybris,
including global B2B sites W.W.Grainger, Rexel, General Electric, Thomson Reuters and 3M as well as consumer brands Toys“R”Us, Metro, Bridgestone, Levi’s,
Nikon, Galeries Lafayette, Migros, Nespresso and Lufthansa. hybris is the future of commerce™. www.hybris.com | [email protected]
Version: March 2014 Subject to change without prior notice © hybris
hybris
+ Galeries
Lafayette
Fashion
Forward:
The iconictrademarks
French department
store gets
a modern makeover
hybris is a trademark of the hybris
Group.
Other brand
names=are
trademarks
and registered
of the respective
companies.
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