EXCLUSIVE: Q&A with Joe Cano, senior VP of digital, Lowe’s
Lowe’s Companies Inc. seeks to build on its growing digital success through the holiday season and beyond.
In a recent conversation with Chain Store Age, Joe Cano, senior VP of digital for Lowe's, provided insight into how the leading home improvement retailer has been developing its digital commerce business and is using leading-edge technology to acquire and retain customers across all channels.
How was Cyber Week for Lowe's?
Cyber Week was great for Lowe’s. We fared very well on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We were excited about appliances, which is one of our top categories online.
We also saw a major engagement with our generative AI-based mobile customer assistant Mylow. Usage almost doubled from what a normal increase would be and customers who engaged with Mylow saw higher conversion and average order value.
And for the first time this year, we had about 3,000 items from our marketplace vendors, everything from storage to saunas.
[READ MORE: Lowe’s expands third-party marketplace assortment]
To what do you credit Lowe’s digital success in the third quarter?
We focused on our foundational efforts. We started expanding product assortment with our marketplace this year and did really well with our core merchandising.
The next thing we focused on was making sure we were priced competitively within the market. That’s obviously a big driver, especially now with inflation and some uncertainty in the economy.
Then we looked at our content scores and how it affected search engine optimization. We made sure that we have been driving organic traffic as well as paid traffic. Lowe’s also launched a creator network, which drove a great new kind of traffic stream.
How do emerging technologies, like streaming video and AI, fit into your digital strategy?
We focus on being where our customers are. Mylow has been a huge success for us, and now we are linking it to videos and products, and customers are really interacting with it.
When a customer comes to Lowe's, a lot of times they don't know exactly what products they want. They know they have a problem, like cabinets that need painting or a leaky faucet. Mylow provides all those services. We also have a version for store associates called Mylow Companion which has been amazing for us.
Mylow Companion is making our store associates more knowledgeable. Conversion is better when someone uses the Mylow app, whether customers or store associates. Lowe’s will continue to evolve Mylow and evolve our AI agents to make it easier for every single shopper, because all we want to do is remove friction. We believe our AI agents are going to help shoppers across the board.
What are Lowe’s top goals for its digital commerce business?
We are going to continuously expand our third-party marketplace assortment offering by going into adjacent categories that make sense for us. Lowe’s will also look at how we are utilizing augmented reality and AI to help customers shop and find their dream kitchen, for example. A lot of new visualizers will come to life.
Right now, we have an offering where shoppers can take a picture of their kitchen and get product recommendations for turning it into their dream kitchen. Customers can visualize in-store with Apple Vision Pro and walk their kitchen before they actually remodel.
Remodeling a kitchen is so hard and daunting for a customer. They look at their kitchen, and want to update it, but don’t have the time or energy to make all the effort. Virtual kitchen remodeling removes all of those obstacles. We have an exciting roadmap for visualization tools, which will be a game-changer for us because we know that customers are staying in their homes longer.
In addition, Lowe’s is now getting insights from sources like Google, OpenAI, TikTok, and Instagram to help determine what products consumers are searching for and how we can get those products onboarded as quickly as possible with our third-party marketplace.
This mean we are reducing the amount of time that it takes to get a seller to start the process of getting onto our marketplace and getting their items live. We have cut it down by 50% this year and next year expect another roughly 50% cut sellers can get onboarded in a couple weeks.
Once Lowe’s identifies a trending product, you might see it on our site in as little as two weeks. We want to make sure that our influencers have the right products to showcase to their customers, as well.
