B&Q spends £60m on relaunched website

They needed to:

B&Q's former website was repeatedly found wanting in surveys of online experiences. In Which?'s annual report on online shops last year diy.com came last out of 96 sites surveyed - down one from the number 95 position the previous year.

Anyone tried it?

The new website also presents a range of content to inspire and help customers throughout their home improvement journey, from browsing and shopping to completing their home improvements.

The new diy.com is built on intelligent design to support a stream of innovations that will be launched throughout next year.

IOW Complete bollocks as per usual.

Last year I was shopping around for a pruning saw. The thing about pruning saws I found is that they can very a lot in size. And so the first thing you need to know before getting around to the B&Q version of the "Technical Specifications" i.e the brand and colour (presumably for punters who are viewing the website on B/W monitors) is how long these things actually are.

The search engine may have improved to the extent that it can now find stuff as quickly as an external Google search, but that appears to be it.

From the pix 2 are folding and two are rigid but all four seem to have more or less the same "features" and "technical specification".

In fact one of the four saws is actually given a size 393mm - the second of the folding saws the bright green one. Presumably this is the size when fully opened. But as no sizes are given for any of the others - especially for the other folder for purposes of comparison - then this simply shows the gormlessness of the pony tailed d******ds responsible for this abortion.

michael adams

...

That ends with:

"Diy.com is the biggest category-specific home improvement website in the UK. The new site now offers our 3.5 million visitors an unrivalled range of home improvement products, is more easily accessible for mobile users, is an amazing source of inspiration and advice, and in the coming year, lots more innovative content and services will be added."

So no matter how much better it might be than it was (and the old Jessops single large sheet mail order catalogue was a model of usability in comparison), they've left plenty of room to completely f*ck it up in future.

And even that article didn't attract me to visit. "Attracting over 3.5m visitors a week..."

Screwfix same search

Typical specification

Specifications: Overall length: 505mm (19¾"). Blade length: 325mm (12¾"). 6tpi blade. Weight: 0.25kg.

michael adams

...

How can it cost £60m to update a website? Is that 600 people on £100,000 a year?

Both Kingfisher companies. Very strange that one system works pretty well and the other has been crap for as long as I can remember

If they'd spent £1m on fixing it and £59m on lowering prices I might consider it.

NT

It is better.

I searched for "plywood 18mm" and it brought up all the options quickly.

My thought exactly. Even given the way that IT contractors routinely rip off "non-IT" customers (cf. any government department you'd care to choose), someone has surely got their figures wrong here, in the report?

Even if it were £6m, not £60m, that's a mind-bogging sum for producing a new website; in fact I'd say £1m would be a ridiculous amount[1]. (I spent my working life in the world of IT.).

John

/Even if it were £6m, not £60m, that's a mind-bogging sum for producing a new website; in fact I'd say £1m would be a ridiculous amount[1]. (I spent my working life in the world of IT.). /q

Reading on a bit....

'Mike Durbridge, director of omnichannel at B&Q, said: "We're investing over £60m in developing B&Qs internet platform to make it really easy for customers to get everything they need, easily and conveniently, for their home improvement projects. '

Maybe that 60m includes all the click & collect kit, training, blah blah blah??

Jim K

yea, I wondered that!

I could have done it for just £60,000, or is that too cheap,lol.

Well it did need something to improve it, as the old site was as bad or worse than wilko's.

Website design is invariably contracted out these days, IME. So it is all down to the competence of the procurer, and what budget freedom they are given. SF started as a web business, so they put money and effort into it. One suspects the original B&Q one was delegated to youngsters.

It is an utter ripoff.

I have colleagues who could do that site (and better: ajax, databases, CSS design are their specialities) and I'm pretty sure 3 of them could turn that site around in 6 months or less (They run several projects in parallel - so I'm taking a guess here).

So if one person costs say £100k/year for salary and overheads, that's 150k.

Double that for consultancy company profits. £300k

Say it actually takes a year because the customer keeps changing their mind. £600k.

I'm having a hard time getting that project to a million let alone what it did cost!

What have you really got here?

2) Rough and ready stock checking (it says "low stock", "out of stock") so I doubt that's realtime checking - probably just a DB update from some other DBs periodically;

4) Some ancillary information, videos, how-tos, projects;

It really isn't actually that many templates. The database existed even it is was rehashed.

"B&Q is also launching a new click-and-collect service to replace the reserve-and-collect service. The new service allows customers greater freedom to purchase products online and to collect them next day from one of B&Q's 360 stores"

Translation:

you now have to pay for things when you reserve them instead of paying when you turn up to collect.

And that's supposed to be an "improvement"

Well as the customer, I can tell you that it isn't.

At some point since I last "reserved" something from Tesco online they have implemented this "improvement" and it's a right PITA.

Instead of just clicking on what you want and printing out a copy of the reservation number (and then turning up at the store after the have phoned/texted you to say that it has arrived), you have to go through the rigmarole of creating an account so that you can pay "securely".

This may be fine for regular users who already have the account, but for occasional purchases - it sucks!

tim

As a non-IT person it seemed to me that all the items were in the database somewhere but the queries didn't bring them up. Doesn't sound like a "new" anything is required, just some proper data entry

I suspect the database was generally complete but was full of minor errors - typos, poor categorisation etc.

A cleverer search algorithm (with a bit of fuzziness) would have probably worked wondered.

investing

conveniently, for

That was going through my mind as well, are they replacing the entire Point of Sale/Back Office Hardware and Software/Database(s)/Data Links/Data Center(s), etc etc?

We all know that the website has been dire for years, maybe that was a reflection of the internal systems as well. Throw it all out and start again...

Along, perhaps, with a little thought for what people actually want to know. If (for example) you browse 'sawn timber' (which I went to look at - don't ask why!), the description given in the list is erratic and incomplete (eg 70mm W, 2400mm long: So what about the other dimension?), so you have to look at each item to work out what is being listed.

Just too painful to use really. I, for one, can't see how these things can cost multiple millions, when they are clearly developed by morons.