Honda - Our platform sells power equiptment now too.
When Honda approached Motoinsight, they were looking to explore digital retailing. They were not quite ready to commit the automotive wing to such a large undertaking, so they instead asked for a proof of concept for their power equipment division.
What came next was a transformation of our Motocommerce product into a new platform for Honda PE to manage their new digital retailing frontier.
Problem
Honda Power Equipment already had a large online catalogue with their corporate website, but there was no way of allowing users to select items for an online purchase.
Another logistical problem was with the retailers. There are a lot of liscenced retailers across Canada who sell Honda PE products and we would need to create a system for all of these privately owned and operated retailers to fufill online purchases.
A Simple Checkout
It goes without saying that the customer checkout had to be as simple and frictionless as possible. We installed “Buy & Pickup” buttons for the available inventory on Honda’s existing corporate website.
These “Buy & Pickup” buttons would trigger our checkout journey, connecting buyers to their nearest retailer based off of location data.
The checkout process included a date scheduler and payment capture - via stripe integration. The checkout process is available on both desktop and mobile.
A Robust Order Management Portal
To help ensure that the fufillment of orders the team at Honda needed a system to manage this new process. Inventory availability, participating retailers, tracking orders and monthly reports were all key features that the backend needed to support.
Honda Canada would control inventory logistics, facilitating the pickup dates with registered vendors and matching serial numbers to available stock.
We created robust filtering options to allow users to not only control and track orders, but also generate custom reports for CSV export and download.
Data could be sliced by date, region, assigned rep and product category and product status.
Results
In November 2017 the pilot project launched, bringing Honda corporate and their 100+ retailers across the country together to move inventory and increase their sales of power equipment nationwide.
Although the platform was a custom build for Motoinsight, the success of the project and our integrations with 3rd parties like Stripe and Honda’s corporate site, set up some future product level improvements for our platform.
We would go on to use the ‘Buy Now’ button as a tech solution for a network of automotive dealerships across Canada and the US, who are hungry for a digital retailing solution.
Project contributors:
Design Lead: Allan De Los Angeles
Designer: Min Kim
Product management: Jakob Brofeltd
Product Owner: Sean Coulson
Development: Motocommerce Engineering team