Success Stories: Petrovich

— We understood that to be successful in Moscow, we needed to surprise our audience. After spending a long time analyzing our customers in other stores, we concluded that the only thing our competitors were missing was convenience. We made this our selling point, and promoted our store just outside of Moscow with the slogan, “Shopping is easy!”

Every visitor receives a tablet device with a simple interface upon entering the store. They can walk around the sales area and add the products they want into a virtual cart by simply scanning the bar code. We help customers complete their orders and pay at the tills, and we either load their purchases into their cars in the warehouse area or offer them delivery services. This whole approach automatically eliminates two very unpleasant part of the shopping experience in other stores: queues and traffic with shopping carts in the sales area.

— In general, yes. The interface is simple. Some customers need basic instructions on how to use it. Most customers, however, are quite curious to try this new shopping format and tell us afterwards that they find it quite convenient to move freely around the store with their hands free.

— Yes, it’s true. All the big Western companies have a presence here: Castorama, Leroy Merlin, OBI, and K-Rauta, plus local companies like Metrika and Maxidom. We had our own format from the very beginning, so we had our own niche in the market: we serve those who do renovations for other people — construction workers, designers, plumbers. They sat with our managers and told them exactly what they needed and in what quantities. The next step was obvious — why bother coming when we can do these interactions by phone? We had already opened our call center 10 years earlier, so it was only logical to offer our clients the ability to place orders on our site.

— We made all the typical mistakes that offline businesses make when they decide to “play e-commerce” for the first time. First off, we had no photos in our product catalog. Can you believe it? A catalog without photos. But in 2010-2011 no hardware store had photos of their products. Sites of DIY stores are typically behind other online stores in terms of content quality. Our sales increased by five times the day we added photos to our site.

The second classic mistake came when we were naming products on our site. Product names in our internal systems like “Sink ball.joint LD PN25 Du80 stand.steel, ” were automatically transferred into our online store. Fixing these names to make them more relevant for our customers wasn’t easy. We want our customers to be able to find whatever they need on our site.

— We came to Yandex.Direct in the summer of 2011. We work with an agency called iConText that performs audits, gives us recommendations on how to optimize our campaigns, and makes it possible for us to test new tools and projects. One example is the reports our purchasing department receives. They show our colleagues which products are most popular on Yandex.Market so that they can check their availability in our stores. They also help us compare our prices with other market leaders and analyze the effect of TV advertising on spikes in branded traffic.

— The economic situation has forced us to set new priorities. People are using the internet more and more to find better offers, so business in general has to face up to the new rules of the internet. Customers want to view a product online and then buy it in a retail shop for the same price they saw on the site. The stereotype about lower prices online no longer applies.

— Last year we launched a big campaign that increased visits to our site by 250%. We had planned for a 100% increase, and thought that might be too optimistic. What ended up happening was that our site was unavailable for several hours a day. Yandex.Metrica, by the way, let us know that the site was down, and we disabled Yandex.Market. Once the site was working again, we re-enabled it. And it went back and forth.

If you dig even deeper, Yandex paid channels can be found in 26% of our conversion paths. When we launched a campaign promoting best-selling products at prices lower than those of our competitors, we could see how a user would come from an ad in Yandex.Direct, see a promotion, go to Yandex.Market to make sure that our price was in fact the best, and only then went directly to our site to make the purchase.

— Our customers are people who value ease of shopping, delivery speed, and good overall service above all, so age and gender don’t really play a role. The messages that work are things like delivery within two hours (in Moscow it’s currently six) and payment by bank card right on the website. This was possible as a result of careful planning of the locations of our warehouses: from the very beginning, we have built our Petrovich locations on significant roads offering easy access. Clients want to place orders online, pay online, and come to the store in two hours and wait for their goods in the comfort of their own car. As strange as it may sound, our price-based offers has very little effect.

— I would definitely mention 2013, when we joined Yandex.Market. Previously we had thought people only used Yandex.Market to compare prices for things like laptops and mobile phones. We were wrong, they compare prices for cement as well! It was a bit of an epiphany that completely changed our view of our market.