Increasing Coop's online market share

About the project

Coop is an online/offline food retailer that boasts the second-highest share of the Swedish FMCG market, with 3.5 million members in its 30 cooperatives.

Over the past decade, NoA Ignite has served as Coop's trusted digital partner, working collaboratively to realize its vision of seamlessly integrating the physical in-store experience with the digital realm.

Challenge

NoA Ignite helps Coop enhance the customer experience across various digital touchpoints. Our commitment involves offering strategic counsel to Coop, ensuring the continuous updating of their diverse systems, and leveraging cutting-edge technology to foster innovation within the organization.

Our approach

Together with Coop, we actively seek opportunities for improvement, addressing both technical and innovative considerations. We provide strategic assistance in updating legacy systems to bring new ideas to life, paving the way for business innovation. We created cross-functional teams that can expand when necessary to suit any scope.

Initially, our collaboration included creating a digital style guide for web, app, and in-store kiosks. We’ve updated the kiosks with coop.se version 3.0 and moved several key APIs to the Microsoft Azure platform. Further work was focused on leveraging Optimizely, Dynamic Yield, and improving customer experience. In addition, we provide them with 24/7 support, ensuring continuous assistance for their operations and systems.

Faster and more secure website with Optimizely 12 and .NET 6

For many companies, addressing technical debt has become increasingly important. To harness technological innovations, we migrated Coop's systems to the new Optimizely 12 and the latest .NET 6 platform. Our migration process began with a thorough analysis. It was essential to redesign many modules to make them compatible with new standards.

To increase the website's user experience, we redesigned the integration mechanism. This involved creating a new, custom headless integration of Optimizely CMS with the React JS library. This not only optimized page performance, speed, and responsiveness but also made it easy to add new features quickly.

Testing website updates with Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield is a tool that helps create highly personalized marketing campaigns and leverages individual product recommendations. It also enables validation testing to verify whether changes to the website affect key performance indicators (KPIs) like the conversion rate or the addition of products to the e-commerce basket. Implementing Dynamic Yield also allowed us to validate and test every new update to any website. This significantly increased the scale of testing, which translates into faster content adaptation based on the ‘data-driven development’ paradigm.

Integrating Dynamic Yield as a Customer Data Platform enabled multichannel personalization of end users' experience. At the same time, it taps into the A/B testing methodology, taking e-commerce to the next level. Thanks to this tool, we can more quickly verify our assumptions and achieve better results in terms of user engagement and conversion.

Weekly recipe inspiration engine

On Coop's website, users can purchase recipes and select whether they want to prepare them using organic, eco-friendly, or regular ingredients. The complete list of products required to prepare the meal is added to their shopping cart. Additionally, users can subscribe to a weekly plan and receive products along with the corresponding recipes.

Simplifying the process for users to select recipes for each week, we developed and validated a prototype suggesting them. The challenge was translating the ingredients list to products available in the e-commerce store. Equally important was creating an effective data structure to support these recipes. We successfully delivered and tested this system with real end-users.

AI-Powered search integration

Our team seamlessly integrated Coop's systems with a new AI-based search engine while also maintaining support for the existing search engine.

The main challenge was designing a module that would automatically choose the search algorithm without directly interacting with the user. We worked with Coop’s AI specialists, who created their AI model based on real user data and behavior. We then implemented a mechanism for switching between these systems on-the-fly, without the user noticing it. This enabled simultaneous A/B testing of both models at the same time to evaluate and polish their quality.

Unified sign-in for all Coop apps

We revamped the authentication system to enable a unified single sign-in for all coop-related applications. We have set up our own OpenID authentication server with custom implementation tailored to client needs. Millions of customers have been seamlessly migrated to the new system without downtime. A unified authentication system allows for quick integration between coop.se and external platforms.

The outcome

We are proud to be helping Coop elevate its e-commerce experience. Implementing modern toolsets such as Optimizely 12, Dynamic Yield, and solutions based on artificial intelligence places Coop at the forefront of innovation.

By removing 10 years of technical debt by replacing Backbone JS and jQuery with the newest ReactJS, we reduced the risks and vulnerabilities related to technologies that are no longer supported. Implementing new functionalities has become easier, simplifying the integration of advancements. As a side effect, Coop’s ability to attract and retain top IT talent has increased since the team now works with the latest technologies.

We hope our continuous collaboration will deliver a seamless user experience across Coop’s online stores.