Aisles Meet Apps: How Jaycar unified digital and in-store shopping with commercetools

In early 2022, Jaycar embarked on a digital transformation journey to tackle several pressing business challenges. The company was struggling to connect with younger audiences, including Gen Z and Generation Alpha, and faced significant gaps in the technology used by its team issues that were underscored by feedback from engagement surveys.

The biggest issue was a huge disconnect between the online and offline shopping experiences, which resulted from running its digital and in-store commerce operations on two separate, aging, slow, predominantly on-prem enterprise business systems. Without an effective solution, Jaycar risked losing market share and revenue opportunities and facing challenges around scalability, security, and compliance. 

While the digital experience wasn't exceptional, at least online customers could find products easily, confirm which items they needed for a project and get personalized recommendations. 

This wasn't the case for offline shopping: store associates couldn't instantly access the information they needed. Just to check inventory, they had to go to the front of the store and check on their desktop computer — all while the store customer could do it faster by simply opening the website on their phone.

The company envisioned a single solution that could power both its online and in-store channels  — unifying all data and transactions on the backend in real time. The goal was to bring the best of the digital experience into the stores and vice versa. As Graeme Faulkner, Chief Technology Officer of Jayar, explained, “When we started thinking about our next generation of technology, we were thinking about in-store as much as we were eCommerce. From the onset, it wasn’t an eCom-only play. Our first engagement with commercetools was from that context.”

The requirements included:

• Composable & cloud-native technology

  • Ability to leverage the best digital capabilities online and in-store

  • Ability to pivot and scale as needed to address changing business requirements
    

• Internally owned team & customer interfaces

  • Store associates, empowered to deliver exceptional service to their in-store customers

  • Ability to easily add new capabilities to adapt to new trends and market changes in weeks (not 3-6 months or more)
    

• The end state: A single ‘commerce’ platform driving all customer interactions across all channels

commercetools presented Jaycar with a unified solution that leverages Composable Commerce for B2C with commercetools InStore. 

InStore brings commercetools’ market-leading digital commerce capabilities into physical stores, making it easier to provide consistent and tailored shopping experiences for online and in-store customers while managing a single system. This enables Jaycar to achieve its vision of unified commerce. 

In addition to powering sales transactions and supporting returns and refunds regardless of where a purchase is made, InStore provides store associates with real-time access to inventory and customer data for more personalized service.

Jaycar kicked off the project in early 2024 with Overdose Digital handling systems integrations. The two teams built a powerful tech stack, handpicking best-in-class vendors from commercetools’ partner ecosystem including Alokai (Frontend), Contentstack (CMS), Algolia (Search) and Adyen (Payments). 

To run the InStore capabilities in its physical environment, Jaycar chose fixed HP terminals for its checkout stations paired with mobile Honeywell PDA tablets. These support traditional store checkout functions including ringing up sales, returns and exchanges, accepting cash and generating receipts. 

More importantly, the devices are fully integrated with Jaycar’s tech stack, which gives associates full access to all product information, inventory data and customer history including loyalty data as well as all commerce functionality, Search, CMS, Payments, CRM etc.

The tablets are also equipped with a barcode scanner, empowering sales associates to easily and quickly check prices, access product information, provide recommendations, and retrieve customer reviews directly from the sales floor. 

Unifying online and store operations under one platform powering all customer interactions enables Jaycar to leverage real-time data across all channels to provide their digital and in-store customers with a seamless, omnichannel shopping experience no matter where they shop.

While still in the pilot phase at selected outlets, Jaycar’s unified commerce powered by commercetools has improved the customer experience and reduced costs while allowing the company to trial new capabilities such as AI-powered search and conversational commerce.

Graeme pointed to headless technology as a key selling point and one of the main reasons Jaycar chose commercetools. The ability to own the frontend (which headless provides) was a non-negotiable requirement. “This is important for any brand interacting with customers. For us, it was also about the daily interactions our in-store team has with the frontend. It’s what they live in all day to serve customers.”

With access to top-tier technology, Jaycar's associates can now seamlessly blend digital tools with the human interactions and expert knowledge that have long defined the company's in-store customer experience. As an added benefit, they can take these robust selling tools onto the sales floor where the selling should occur, with the customer standing right next to them.

This enables associates to have comprehensive product information previously only available online at their fingertips, allowing them to quickly and easily answer customer questions and provide detailed specifications. If a product is out of stock, they can check store inventory and warehouse availability, place an order and provide customers with delivery timelines. 

In addition, they can tap into Algolia’s product recommendations to aid in suggestive selling. This is especially helpful with Jaycar’s less technical customers who often come into the store to purchase items for a project without a clear idea of what’s required to complete it. Graeme pointed out, “It’s also a great way to drive consistent up-sells without the staff training overhead.”

The solution also benefits customers directly by supporting omnichannel shopping. For example, a customer can browse at home and create a cart or project list online. If they come to the store to purchase the items, an associate can quickly pull up their list and convert it into an in-store cart. Customers can also build a cart in-store with an associate, and if they’re not ready to purchase, they can convert the items and save them in an online cart. 

Unifying in-store and online commerce also means customers can return items purchased online in-store and convert unreceipted returns into receipted/retrieved returns. They can also have associates confirm their loyalty point status to ensure they take advantage of any available rewards.

Since the backend is one system, all data comes in real-time from stores and online. This ensures that inventory and pricing information is always current so that what customers see online matches what they find in-store.

All of these things were simply impossible to accomplish with legacy in-store technology. It was designed to facilitate sales, not help you sell. commercetools’ solution is designed to enable engagement with the customer from the moment they walk in the door, maximizing the sales opportunity.

Unlike Jaycar’s prior technology, its new composable stack is easily extensible and changeable, which means it can keep up with the changing needs of its teams and customers. “Before we were relying on some big software company to make small screen changes and they couldn’t make it happen or it would take months. This is the sort of thing that made us want to go headless in the first place.”

Case in point: Graeme mentioned the company is starting to sell installation services, which require integrating a booking system for appointments. “This is going to be easy to do now — and if I have another good idea I want to implement next week, I can do it — because of the composability of commercetools.”