kika
With 26 furniture stores from Vienna to Dornbirn, kika is one of the largest furniture retailers in Austria. The trend store inspires its customers with a large selection of furniture and interior design items. With a range of more than 30,000 products, there is something to suit both every taste and budget. Thanks to a sensational price-performance ratio and a large number of young brands, kika creates a living experience for every need with its furnishing solutions.
Today, the retail stores and the online store register more than 5 million customer visits every year. More than 500,000 regular customers consistently place their trust in kika and benefit from the numerous advantages of the own customer loyalty program "kika Fanclub".
Regarding the scaling and further development possibilities of the old shop platform, kika reached its limits in terms of its own growth course. The new shop platform should therefore be based on standard software, have a wide range of integration options, be flexibly scalable and have a modular structure. The joint use of an e-commerce platform together with the furniture retailer Leiner, which also belongs to the group, should leverage synergy effects: The development of new functions, integration of new systems and last but not least the operation of the previously independent platforms should be standardized and costs reduced as a result. For the implementation of the project, kika was also looking for an experienced solution provider with an agile mindset for a long-term and cooperative partnership.
In a carefully conducted selection process, Adobe Commerce Cloud as the e-commerce platform and PHOENIX MEDIA Austria as the Adobe Gold Solution Partner were able to assert themselves with their solution approach - and thus won the budget for the demanding project.
The big challenge was to migrate kika together with the furniture retailer Leiner from two independently operated shop platforms to an Adobe Commerce instance within a very short time. In addition, the new Adobe Commerce Cloud platform should be seamlessly integrated into the existing system landscape. Among other things, this consists of:
- PIM: ContentServ
- ERP: Microsoft Dynamics AX
- Online-Marketing: SAP Emarsys Omnichannel Customer Engagement Platform
- Payment: Computop, PayPal, Klarna
- Tracking: Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
- As well as CRM and loyalty solutions used across groups
The further expansion of the product range required a shop platform whose software architecture is designed for large product catalogues, supports several warehouses and offers opportunities to bring online and stationary business closer together. Last but not least, the range of payment methods should be further expanded.
The complex furniture logistics were made simple and transparent for kika customers with a functionally greatly expanded shopping cart and checkout. Availability and delivery times are determined in real time for the customer's shopping cart - and clearly displayed for the various procurement methods: parcel delivery, forwarding agent delivery & store collection (Click & Collect). In addition, other services (e.g. a pick-up bus, furniture assembly, express delivery) can be booked in the shopping cart.
The FanClub customer loyalty program was integrated for the particularly loyal regular customers. Customers can not only register for the FanClub in the online store, but also collect valuable fan points with every purchase - and save money on future purchases by redeeming fan points! In addition, this customer group has exclusive access to particularly favorable special offers and a broader range of self-service options.
The MVP of the new kika online store was rolled out in October 2020 - and thus fell in the first winter of the global Corona pandemic with its lockdowns and temporary store closures. The flexibility of Adobe Commerce has enabled kika to react flexibly to the regularly changing requirements for retail - and to be a reliable furnishing partner for kika customers even in difficult times. Customers could benefit from free delivery or pick up their new furniture safely from a nearby furniture store using customized Click&Collect offers.
The project started with a MVP approach, and kika’s online store was successfully rolled out in October 2020 after a project period of just six months. The number of orders on the new platform doubled just a few days after going live. In addition, the switch to Adobe Commerce enabled the furniture giant to have an extremely successful Black Week.
One of the main goals of the project was to strengthen multichannel sales by largely standardizing the customer experience in the retail stores and the online store. In this way, kika customers benefit from the same prices, special offers, information on the availability of products and fan club advantages - regardless of which sales channel they choose.
With the consolidation of the two online shops from kika and Leiner in one Adobe Commerce instance, new functionalities only have to be developed and rolled out once - and can then be used in all online stores. In addition to further development, the hoped-for synergy effects will also result from savings in the areas of support, operation and license costs for the new commerce platform.
The advantages of Adobe Commerce using kika as an example
Adobe Commerce offers a wide range of functions out-of-the-box. As a result, retailers can react to new market conditions with comparatively short reaction times. With the switch to the new platform, kika also succeeded in introducing new payment methods quickly and easily.
One of the key unique selling points of Adobe Commerce is the extremely large ecosystem with several 100,0000 developers around the world. The Magento Marketplace is also an app store that offers a variety of extensions and features that can be used to easily expand the functionality of Adobe Commerce in a very specialized way. Complex and time-consuming in-house development is largely unnecessary. Retailers like kika benefit from a fast time-to-market and reduced implementation costs.
With Multi-Source-Inventory (MSI), kika customers can see which items are in stock in which stores - and how quickly they can be picked up locally. The availability of the individual item in the online shop as well as in the nearby retail stores can be checked on the product detail pages. This check is carried out automatically for all selected items in the shopping cart. The multi-storage capability with MSI is a very important function for multi-channel sales, which results in many synergies.
With the help of content staging and scheduling, the same advertising campaigns can be run both in the online shop and via the brochures on site in the respective stores. This feature helps the kika content team tremendously with the time-controlled and automated delivery of content. At the same time, the staging dashboard within Adobe Commerce offers a complete overview of the entire content management on a timeline. This further facilitates collaboration in a large team.
As the basis for its own customer loyalty program (kika fan club), kika leverages the Adobe Commerce standard functions such as a reward point program, gift cards, customer group-specific prices, category authorizations and customer attributes.
Overall, kika can now offer its customers an even larger and broader range of products as well as a better customer journey and user experience. The use of digital channels in the sale of products and services is indispensable today and has gained in importance over the past few years. The Corona crisis in particular, during which the classic retail stores were temporarily closed, has once again significantly increased the relevance of online sales.