Europe’s largest wholesale distributor of professional hair and beauty products, Pro-Duo, has upgraded its French and German ecommerce sites to create modern, agile and responsive trading platforms designed to increase conversions.
First opened in Belgium in 1999, Pro-Duo, now part of Sally Beauty Holdings, has more than 190 stores across Europe and offers more than 5,000 products for hair, skin and nails including professional lines and an extensive selection of exclusive brands.
With 25% of the global personal care market predicted to be online by 2024, increasing from 13% in 20181, Pro-Duo wanted to ensure it was delivering an exceptional customer experience (CX) by creating highly relevant, personalised and frictionless customer journeys.
However, the legacy sites, despite being on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) platform, did not have the necessary user interface (UI) to meet these CX aspirations, resulting in low conversion rates especially in comparison to existing sites (also on the SFCC platform) within the Sally Beauty portfolio.
Sally Beauty has a long-standing partnership with Astound Commerce UK (ACUK), which implemented the successful launch of multiple sites for the beauty retailer in 2017, driving record online sales with a 26% increase in revenue after just three months. Based on this track record of success, when it became apparent the Pro-Duo sites needed upgrading, Sally Beauty turned once again to ACUK as its digital partner.
ACUK designed and delivered a solution, configuring and integrating both SFCC and multiple third-party applications, to provide improved online experiences for shoppers. Despite the onset of the covid-19 pandemic and disruption this caused to business globally, the project ran to time with both sites going live in March.
Central to ensuring the project deadline was meet was the custom ’Reference Application’, designed by ACUK, which allows multiple brands and locations to leverage the central code base. This unique solution allows Sally Beauty to launch new sites swiftly and as each site operates from the same core code base, support and new feature enhancement now runs more efficiently.
Richard Surridge, Ecommerce Director for Sally Europe, explains: “Astound Commerce UK are a trusted partner who consistently deliver best-in-breed solutions while also being a pleasure to work with. Across both projects we went through a detailed consultation process and the ACUK team assessed our business model to provide a solution that is scalable and futureproof.”
“Given that covid-19 has irrevocably changed the retail landscape, it is essential to have an expert digital partner, such as Astound, to ensure our businesses succeed long-term,” he adds.
Astound Commerce UK MD, Terry Hunter, adds: ““We were delighted to work with the team at Sally Beauty again as it is always a great affirmation of our approach when customers bring new projects to us. Client satisfaction is at the core of our business model and I’m proud that companies who work with us, stay with us and continue to hold us as their systems integrator partner of choice.”
