Exploring a seamless phygital experience with Instore Maps

Author: Anuroop Rajappa

Navigation plays a significant role in creating convenience for customers. Today customers are used to
the convenience of online shopping where they can find a product with a single tap on the screen.
While, finding a product in the physical store can take even longer. Especially when it is a large format
retail store, product search can be quite time consuming.
At Lowe’s stores, where the average store area is 112,000 sq ft, it’s important for customers to be able
to find what they’re looking for easily and accurately.

To solve this customer pain point, our Indoor Guidance team has built a new’ Store Maps Platform’
from the ground up, along with iOS and Android SDKs to generate consumer store maps. The Indoor
Guidance Team collaborated with the Store Merchandising and Planning Teams to evaluate store plan,
floor plan, planogram data for each of the Lowe’s stores.

With this new ‘In Store Maps’, customers with the Lowe’s app can navigate the physical stores just as
easily as our online store. With Store Maps available for all stores on the app, customers can easily find
departments, aisle and bay locations, or even pin an item location on the map. In addition, Store Maps
will display Points of Interest like restrooms, service desks and pickup lockers for a convenient
shopping experience.

Since its launch across all stores, customers are accessing the Store Maps app close to 100k times a
week and climbing! What’s more, customers were able to find their item location successfully 70% of
the time!

Customers can access the store map right from the product detail page, the home page, store locator and
the new Lowe’s widget. The most visited product categories in Store Map are Tile, Appearance Boards,
Ceiling Fans, and Bathroom Vanities. The app also gives the opportunity to the customers to add
feedback directly within the Store Map – letting us know if an item is not in the provided location, is
out of stock, or is low in stock.

This continuous feedback loop allows Lowe’s to uncover pain points to ultimately to gather customer
insights, drive product location accuracy and enhance the customer convenience.

Up next, Store Maps will be able to send Product Location Feedback directly to stores, as well as ingest
daily store reset data. In the back half of 2022, Store Maps will expand to show products in non-
traditional aisles and bays, like the Garden Center, Appliances, and brand pods. Store Maps pathing
feature will enable Optimized BOPIS order pick for Store Associates.

About the author:
Anuroop Rajappa Director – Commerce Platform Team at Lowe’s India. He is a Leader in
Engineering with over 10 years of experience in building Mobile Applications and Enterprise
Platforms. He is passionate about building high-performing engineering teams, he loves to explore new technologies and architecture that solve customer problems.