Omnichannel e-commerce.

As a brand characterized by openness and dialogue, Maisons du Monde unites its 7.2 million customers around desirable and sustainable lifestyles. Atmospheres for the home across multiple styles can be found in its constantly renewed range of furniture and decor. With optimism, creativity, commitment, and proximity as its core values, the brand is based on a high-performance, omnichannel model.

Digitalization and customer service drive this love brand and its raison d’être: “To inspire people to be open to the world, so that together we can create unique, welcoming and sustainable places to live.” In 2022, Maisons du Monde launched the brand's Good is Beautiful movement, to make sustainable development a key part of its strategy.

Maisons du Monde wants to increase its attractiveness by optimizing the customer experience using three levers: expanding its range, harmonising the digital and physical experience through to the last delivery mile, and committing the brand to promoting circular economies.

“We’re now in a position to offer experiences and features that are specific to each of our two targets, B2C and B2B, and to ensure genuine convergence between the digital and in-store journeys,” explains Jérémy Lechardeur, CTO Digital and e-Commerce at Maisons du Monde.

Since it was founded in 1996, the brand has become a European leader in furniture and home decor. Operating in 11 countries and 13 languages with its 357 stores and web platform, Maisons du Monde generates sales of over €1.337 billion. With 29% of its sales online and 52% including a digital component, the group’s digital platform plays a key role, and Adobe Commerce is its cornerstone.

In 2019, the group took a new strategic direction, with a growth model based on digital commerce and boosting its international sales. This meant developing an omnichannel approach and harmonizing the online and physical journeys. Maisons du Monde engages with its customers through three channels:

• Its stores, used by its B2C end customers
• Its website, which mainly targets end customers but also its B2B customers, micro-enterprises/SMEs, and interior designers
• B2B key accounts, which have their own dedicated sales team

Harmonizing the customer experience by offering specific features for each journey

Today, the Maisons du Monde website draws substantial level of traffic, with close to 300 million visits in 2022, 73% of them on mobile devices. The Marketplace is 500 sellers strong, as verified by Maisons du Monde, and managed using a solution developed by Mirakl, one of Adobe’s strategic partners. This has expanded the group's catalog by over 200,000 products, in addition to the brand’s own 18,000 products. Aside from its solution’s performance in managing these traffic and sales volumes, the group faces a key challenge around customer retention, product delivery, and ensuring the continuity of the customer journey, both online and in-store.

“Digital technology and the marketplace have enabled us to expand the catalog and our product families, far beyond what we can stock in-store. It’s about purchasing, but above all optimising the experience: the challenge is to adapt our customers' journeys both in-store and online so that they can take advantage of an extensive catalog, with features that reflect their B2C or B2B profiles,” explains Jérémy Lechardeur.

Maisons du Monde has made Adobe Commerce the pillar of its digital platform because it is so robust and flexible. The group opted for a headless architecture, which separates the back office from the front office. As a result, Maisons du Monde can use the same foundation to deploy several interfaces with specific features, to respond either to customer journey requirements or to the expectations of its different targets.

“Adobe Commerce is a fundamental, modular, headless solution that allows us to build a digital platform ready for the challenges we face,” says Lechardeur.

Bringing the digital and physical channels closer together to improve in-store sales performance

The new digital platform has helped Maisons du Monde rethink the in-store experience: sales staff now have an app that gives them access to the entire online catalog, with features specific to in-store sales. As an extension of the website, the app also helps improve customer insight and provides continuity between the online and in-store journeys. The end customer has two options: either pay directly at the checkout or continue their purchase online.

“The advantage Adobe Commerce offers is the ability to provide our sales staff with a tablet application that gives them quick access to our extended Marketplace catalog to help our in-store customers. This feature creates a smoother in-store customer journey, where we have a real challenge avoiding queues at the checkout,” says Lechardeur.

Bringing the two journeys closer together is also about deliveries: 32% of online purchases are delivered to stores. While the in-store conversion rate is already benefiting from this, Maisons du Monde wants to strengthen cross-channel journeys further, by encouraging customers who come to collect their orders to add other products to their purchases.

“Ten percent of our customers are cross-channel. The idea is to offer an experience that harmonises with the website, because delivery to store improves customer retention,” explains Lechardeur.

Optimizing delivery notes for a smoother end-to-end experience

Behind the scenes, this smoother journey relies on sophisticated management of delivery notes and the logistics chain, since different carriers deal with different product categories from different storage locations. The problem has grown as a result of integrating the Marketplace and its 500 sellers.

“We need to be in a position to manage mixed baskets with various delivery constraints, and therefore split delivery notes, while guaranteeing our customers the best experience based on their location. We have been able to develop a bespoke solution with Adobe Commerce that has given us this flexibility,” notes Lechardeur.

The B2B segment is still a small part of Maisons du Monde's business — with 10% of sales — but the new dedicated B2B experiences are creating rapid growth in this segment and a real opportunity for the brand. The first priority is to create bespoke customer journeys for professionals, especially interior designers. The group is adjusting its offering to improve the way quotes are amended until they are finalized, offer sales discounts depending on the quantity of products purchased, and manage payment methods and due dates based on volumes.

The second priority is to facilitate the relationship between Maisons du Monde customers and interior designers by using the Rhinov app, which is designed to help customers plan their home decor projects, offering renovation and decoration advice, inspiration, a 3D layout plan, product lists, and sales discounts.

"We rely on Adobe Commerce as a foundation for our digital ecosystem. It's modular and robust and gives us headless capabilities," comments Lechardeur, adding, “This is a highly competitive industry. Now we can be more responsive and develop new experiences very easily. For us, that’s a real advantage.”

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Improving customer autonomy and continuing to expand the Maisons du Monde offering

In the future, Maisons du Monde plans to continue optimizing customers' in-store experience by giving them more autonomy. Creation of a new engagement channel, using a native app based on Adobe Commerce, is under consideration.

As a good corporate citizen with a commitment to promoting local suppliers, Maisons du Monde plans to launch a new service called “Second Chance”, to put products returned by customers back into the sales circuit. A circular economy project of this kind is a strategic opportunity for Maisons du Monde, and entirely consistent with its CSR commitments.

"We have a very strong homemade mindset in our DNA," Lechardeur concludes. "Our objective is to take the best of Adobe's Commerce capabilities, R&D, and know-how to meet our needs, so we can free-up time in-house to develop new growth opportunities."