Norli

When Norli got in touch in 2017, they wanted to strengthen the online store's results in isolation, and see how we could utilize the benefits of their physical presence in a digital strategy.  

Within just 4 months, we had launched an MVP of their new online store based on Adobe Commerce, which gave Norli a good foundation for further development and optimization.  

Over the past five years, we have had a very active collaboration and Norli has been able to carry out a number of exciting initiatives. They have a very successful Click & Collect solution, a customer club across physical and digital, they have adopted Autostore and we have launched new online store views for both B2B and Mamut sales, to name a few. 
 

Advanced stocks

One of the really big wins we've achieved together is the introduction of advanced stocks, which is also referred to as a ship-from-store strategy.  

The book industry has traditionally functioned in such a way that all new online orders trigger purchases from the publishing centre, which then sends the product to the customer.  

In the pre-project with Norli, we identified this as an opportunity where we could utilize existing stock in store in an efficient way rather than making new purchases.  

We therefore developed a solution where online store orders automatically check what is in stock in selected stores, if a store near the customer has the product in stock, the order is sent to that store, so existing stock is reduced, instead of making new purchases.  

The store staff are notified about a new order, they process the order in the same system and have a solution in place for shipping and packaging, then the item is sent directly from the store to the end customer. 

The results

In 2021, John Thomasgaard (CEO) in Norli was able to tell E24 about the cleaning job and the e-commerce venture that gave the chain record results in 2020: 

We were a bit late with our e-commerce venture, but we needed time to figure out how to align. Now we have got most things in place and have the market's most profitable model, claims Thomasgaard.  

Online shopping now accounts for around 30 per cent of sales, and this is where the growth will be in the coming years.  

Advance stock is especially for books as employees often have time during the day to complete online shopping orders, in addition to the fact that the volumes per book are too small for it to make sense to have all titles available in an automatic picking system.  

- There is no doubt that there are far better margins to sell a puzzle from the main warehouse than from a shop. While it can be the opposite with a book. At the same time, we see the effect of a healthy and profitable store network together with online shopping.  

The positive development has given the chain opportunities to build up a significantly larger digital department in-house, which makes them a very competent and exciting customer to work with for us.