What Does It Take to Win on The Home Depot and Grainger?

Home improvement retail giants are making strides to improve online customer experience.

The Home Depot is in the process of remodeling its stores to support its successful buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) strategy. Results for the home improvement company have been strong, with 10% of its overall sales stemming from ecommerce, according to The Motley Fool. Fifty percent of these online sales are picked up at brick-and-mortar stores.

Grainger, which distributes maintenance, repair, and operations products, is also focused on improving end-to-end customer experiences. The company took an "endless aisle" strategy in 2019, making its vast catalog of products available online. The results? The company reported that ecommerce sales accounted for 56% of its total revenue in 2017, its most recent report.

Tool and Hardware Brands Have the Power to Win

The opportunity: Tool and hardware brands can control precisely how products are displayed on the digital shelf — everywhere the products appear. Brands must deliver the right product information, images, and other digital assets in the right context to influence the next sale.

But delivering channel-specific content at the speed and scale required isn't easy. Each retailer or distributor has different requirements and methods of data collection. The retailer requirements for The Home Depot, Grainger, and other online retailers change across product categories frequently.

For example, item set-up requirements for a drill on The Home Depot and Grainger are different.

Syndication: The Right Content for the Right Place

At its simplest, syndication is about sending the right content to the right place. Sending data from Point A to Point B should be an open, transparent, and low-cost process.

Syndication can’t begin or end with mere data delivery to grow product sales. Brands need the ability to customize content for every channel while ensuring a consistent brand experience. They also need the ability to refine this experience to drive discovery.

This process requires an integrated system that lets brands store and manage channel-ready versions of product information. One that allows brands to adjust data for one channel — or across the core data set — dependent on need. One that will enable brands to validate data against these requirements so they can deliver the best content for every channel.