Digitec Galaxus: Matching happy shoppers with their ideal products with Google Cloud
About Digitec Galaxus
Digitec Galaxus is the largest online retailer in Switzerland. The company prides itself on inspiring customers to actively participate in its community, while offering a comfortable and efficient shopping experience. As Digitec Galaxus grows, its goal is to further improve the customer experience as well as offer sustainable purchasing options.
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Contact usSwiss online retailer Digitec Galaxus leverages a range of Google Cloud solutions to personalize the customer journey for its vast and rapidly growing community of more than 2 million active users.
Google Cloud results
- Recommendations AI creates a personalized online shopping experience for customers, so they can easily find the products they love
- Enabled easy implementation with the assistance of the Google Cloud team
- Targeted recommendations for the end customer, resulting in higher click-throughs
40% higher click-through with Google Recommendations AI
When you’re shopping online, you’re often on your own. There’s no “Welcome!” from a retail assistant or a group of friends around to help you decide what to buy. However, that doesn’t mean online shopping has to be impersonal. At least not with Digitec Galaxus, Switzerland’s top online retailer.
Part of the country’s leading retail company, Migros Group, Digitec Galaxus is actually two online stores in Switzerland: digitec.ch, which offers electronics and media products to its consumers, and galaxus.ch, an all-round online store with something for everyone, from furniture and appliances, to toys, fashion, and pet supplies. Digitec Galaxus also has an internationalization strategy, which began in 2018 with the launch of galaxus.de in Germany. The company is seeking to expand throughout Europe and globally. Aside from global expansions and growing popularity, what any Digitec Galaxus webshop has in common is the mission to make the customer experience of each individual shopper behind the screen the best it can be.
“We aim for our landing pages to be the most relevant for our customers when it comes not only to purchasing great products, but also to the browsing, entertainment, and social experiences they offer. Our goal is to fulfill our customers’ individual needs and intents.”
—Tobias Quelle, Head of Product & User Experience, Digitec Galaxus“As an online retailer, improving the customer experience is no longer about diversifying the range of products customers can buy at the click of a button,” explains Christian Sager, Product Owner for Personalization at Digitec Galaxus. “For us, it’s about providing a platform that is interesting and relevant to every single person who visits.”
To this end, Christian’s team, known within the company as Team Darwin, was founded in 2017 with the purpose of designing the Digitec and Galaxus shops of the future. What this means in practice today is that Digitec Galaxus’ developers, engineers, machine learning experts, product owners, and UX designers work collaboratively with a shared goal, explains Tobias Quelle, Head of Product and UX at Digitec Galaxus: “We aim for our landing pages to be the most relevant for our customers when it comes not only to purchasing great products, but also to the browsing, entertainment, and social experiences they offer. Our goal is to fulfill our customers’ individual needs and intents.”
“After implementing Recommendations AI, we’ve been able to give our customers a much more personalized experience, with product recommendations that better suit their interests.”
—Christian Sager, Product Owner for Personalization, Digitec GalaxusPersonalizing the shopping experiences of each and every customer
Having worked on a cooperative basis for years, in 2019 Team Darwin invited a Google Cloud engineer for a deep dive conversation around next steps for personalization, and this guest introduced the team to Recommendations AI. “We were looking for ways to maximize the value of our data, so the timing was perfect to learn about Recommendations AI. Very soon after that introduction, we became one of its early adopters,” Christian recalls.
With assistance from the Google Cloud team, Recommendations AI was promptly integrated within the Digitec Galaxus recommendation framework, built using Merchant Center. This way, the tool could start incorporating product-related metadata such as product name, category, and description, as well as user events, to later predict what customers might be interested in based on their selections and behaviors.
“After implementing Recommendations AI, we’ve been able to give our customers a much more personalized experience, with product recommendations that better suit their interests,” says Christian. “It’s not only led to a 40% increase in click-throughs on the product page, we also believe that it’s been a factor in helping Digitec Galaxus toward making its next billion (Swiss Francs). Both are major milestones that we’re proud of.” Shoppers can now find their preferred products faster, and that leads to higher overall conversion rates. Also, if certain products are no longer available, Recommendations AI helps customers to find alternatives, saving them the time needed to search for products elsewhere.
“Using Recommendations AI allows for more cost-effective development. With minimum effort, we could add an external recommendation algorithm in the existing framework, giving us new insights and additional benefits and serving great customer experiences.”
—Christian Sager, Product Owner for Personalization, Digitec GalaxusDeveloping an intuitive customer experience, cost-effectively
While personalizing the shopping experience with Recommendations AI, Digitec Galaxus has also been able to leverage even more Google solutions to develop its online shops, including Google Analytics 360, Google Tag Manager, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. From the analytical data Digitec Galaxus explores using Google Analytics, new insights emerge, leading to a deeper understanding of customers’ needs and the ability to cater to them.
Meanwhile, Recommendations AI helps Team Darwin with agile development to ensure that the team remains flexible and that adjustments can be made when needed. Depending on strategic goals, such as improving the click-through-rate, driving conversions, or increasing revenue, the team can adapt its optimization objective.
“Using Recommendations AI allows for more cost-effective development. With minimum effort, we could add an external recommendation algorithm in the existing framework, giving us new insights and additional benefits and serving great customer experiences,” Christian says. “With these recommendations, we can offer our customers personalized content in places like our homepage, or the product detail pages. Even the recommendations in our newsletters, which are a very valuable traffic source for us, are fully personalized.”
Helping customers shop online more sustainably
For Digitec Galaxus, engaging customers is a two-way street. In an elaborate online magazine, an editorial team provides news, detailed information about products on offer, or entertainment articles, encouraging customers to join the conversation. In a corresponding forum, they can provide feedback, which is taken seriously by the editors, category teams, developers, product owners and, of course, Team Darwin.
Recognizing the need for a greener retail environment, the shop also helps customers navigate the online shopping world more sustainably, for example through blog posts that explain what eco labels customers should look for. In fact, sustainability and climate protection have become a major topic for Digitec Galaxus. “We provide an optional CO2 compensation for all purchases of our customers, taking the entire value chain of the products into account. Furthermore, our integrated resale platform enables customers to sell and purchase secondhand products, offering a way for climate-conscious customers to expand these products’ life cycles,” explains Tobias Quelle.
Meanwhile, with sustainable technology behind its online platform, Digitec Galaxus can continue focusing on growth and expansion. The company’s goal is to become a leading online retail company throughout Europe, cooperating with reliable partners such as Google.
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About Digitec Galaxus
Digitec Galaxus is the largest online retailer in Switzerland. The company prides itself on inspiring customers to actively participate in its community, while offering a comfortable and efficient shopping experience. As Digitec Galaxus grows, its goal is to further improve the customer experience as well as offer sustainable purchasing options.