The Home Depot
Case Study
Home Depot Collaborative Commerce
Home Depot was looking for a quick way to expand its online offerings to include major home appliances. When it approached the manufacturers looking for product data, they all told Home Depot the same thing – talk to JGSullivan. So Home Depot did, and in much less time than they could have ever done it themselves, they had a complete home appliances category on their site, with full and accurate product specs.
Client Profile
- Industry: Consumer Durables, Do-It-Yourself
- Products: Home improvement supplies of all types, from major appliances to nails and screws.
Client Challenges
- Limited data. Home Depot had very limited existing data and no integrations with various appliance manufacturers to get a consistent flow of current data.
- Overworked internal IT. Home Depot's own IT department was overwhelmed with projects and recognized that this project could be effectively done as an external piece with bi-directional smart links to maintain session information.
- Extremely aggressive timeframe. Home Depot's management wanted to get major appliances on the HomeDepot.com site faster than the internal teams could ever round up the data and do the programming.
JGSullivan's Approach
- Leverage existing relationships. No one has better relationships in the home appliances industry than JGSullivan, and we were able to capitalize on our existing product specification data feeds from all major appliance manufacturers to populate the Home Depot solution.
- Leverage existing technology. The solution Home Depot required was very similar to what JGSullivan had provided for others in the industry, and we were able to leverage existing technology and techniques to rapidly produce their application.
- Work with existing partners. In providing this solution, JGSullivan worked closely with Home Depot's existing design agency to carefully skin the new solution with the Home Depot look and feel.
- Never sacrifice quality. Even though Home Depot needed a "quick-fix" solution, JGSullivan went through the same rigorous process required of their other partner vendors. Our systems were examined and passed an in-depth security and technology audit, and all our work was subject to the review of Home Depot's technical, brand and legal teams.
Results
- Fast results. We beat Home Depot's aggressive schedule and had the major home appliances catalog ready to add to their site even faster than they had expected.
- Accurate data. Utilizing our always-fresh product specification data feeds directly from the manufacturers, the Home Depot solution always had accurate and complete product data, with no effort required on their part.
- Seamless customer experience. With a look and feel tailored to exactly match the rest of the HomeDepot.com site, as well as clean handoffs of session information back and forth between the HomeDepot.com site and our solution, customers never knew that the data they were seeing wasn't coming directly from Home Depot.
