Devlyn Optical saw an omnichannel opportunity

Founded in 1936 by Dr Frank J. Devlyn, Devlyn Optical is a family-owned, multinational optical retailer with operations in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and the USA. Today, Devlyn is one of the largest eyeglass retailers in Latin America, operating over 1,200 retail locations. They have nearly 5,000 employees who work across four distinguished retail brands: Devlyn, Vetro, Inmoda and Optimart. In 2012, they were running a highly successful brick-and-mortar business, but recognised some pain points and great opportunities. No retailer in their market was offering an e-commerce solution for eyeglasses, so there was an opportunity to expand their leadership position in the market.

Devlyn had two problems: stock availability and shallow inventory. “Our shops offered on average 580 SKUs with one or two pieces of inventory per SKU. Yet in our network we have 25,000 SKUs with available inventory that we were not offering our customers,” said Andrew Devlyn, Director of Innovation at Devlyn Group. For example, a customer in Store A might like a certain pair of glasses, but want them in red. It was difficult for Devlyn to “save that sale” even if Store B had the right glasses in the right colour.

What if they could expose all their physical store inventory to their digital channel? How much would that increase conversion? And what if their shop associates could also access that inventory and offer a true “endless aisle” experience to customers? How much could this “save the sale” process increase their revenue? To do this, Devlyn would need a system to unify their inventory, route any order to the best location and provide the tools to turn their shops into mini-distribution centres. They chose Magento Commerce.

A customer-first omnichannel online strategy

The company laid the foundation for its ambitious growth strategy by launching its first online store on Magento Open Source in 2013. Seeing customers’ tremendous response to their omnichannel e-commerce offering, Devlyn upgraded to Magento Commerce in 2015 to bring even more product SKUs online, take advantage of a more robust performance, extend their large customer loyalty programme online and more easily manage multiple customer groups — including employees, who were eligible for a discount programme. When it came time to take Devlyn’s e-commerce operations to the next level of omnichannel engagement, the obvious choice was to upgrade to Magento Commerce 2.

Devlyn needed a high-performance, full-suite solution to support their long-term vision of delivering the best customer experience for prescription glasses. “The difference that Magento brings is its flexibility,” said Devlyn. They decided to take advantage of Magento Order Management, the solution that would bring the company’s omnichannel vision into focus. With Order Management, they could offer a triple threat for fulfillment: Ship-from-Store, Deliver-to-Store and Click and Collect.

The company created a virtual pool of inventory that could then be sold in any channel: online or by an associate in any of their shops. “To service our customers, Ship-from-Store was obvious,” said Devlyn. Now the customer who wanted those glasses in a different colour can choose from thousands of options, instead of just what the shop has in stock. “We believe we have a very compelling offer that is truly more omnichannel than any of our competition.”

The order management features revolutionised Devlyn’s order processing. Through the power of the Magento Commerce sourcing engine, orders are now routed to the closest store, while minimising other costs like split deliveries. Once the order hits the shop, Order Management makes it easy for the associate to pick, pack and deliver the frames to the lab for processing. This is all done efficiently and without time-consuming conversations with the corporate office. Lastly, the flexibility of Magento Order Management enabled Devlyn to integrate the pick, pack and ship processing with their existing Point of sale solution, instead of deploying another tool.

Amazing omnichannel results — fast

From purchase to deployment in less than six months, Devlyn achieved their omnichannel vision: to be flexible and to grow, evolve and innovate over time. Devlyn implemented their new solution in a lightning fast time to market. Instead of tinkering with their ERP — trying to fit a round peg in a square hole — or spending ages deploying a massive, disruptive e-commerce platform only to be met with complexities of customisation, they chose Magento Commerce and Order Management and got it right the first time.

Devlyn experiences some incredible results, including a 163 per cent increase in online conversion and a 271 per cent increase in mobile conversion. Their online conversion skyrocketed because of two factors:

1. By enabling Devlyn to expose their store inventory to online consumers, Magento Commerce turned “out of stock” situations into transactions.
2. The upgrade to Magento Commerce dramatically enhanced the consumer experience. “The updated checkout flow was a lot easier, so we saw an uptick in conversions on mobile and desktop,” said Devlyn.

Customers clearly enjoy using the website, as session duration grew 25 per cent. Devlyn was thrilled with the numbers, describing them as “angry.”

By giving store associate better access to the full set of inventory, Devlyn experienced an amazing 200% increase in “save the sale” orders. Since associates had full access to inventory in the warehouse as well as other shops, they never let a sale walk out the door.

The bottom line, said Andrew Devlyn, is that “omnichannel makes customers loyal.

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