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Home Depot’s Technology Strategies vs. Amazon

Industry observers are taking notice—Home Depot’s technology and online business strategies are helping the company grow and compete in e-commerce, despite Amazon’s online retail dominance.

The retailer’s “largest and arguably most important investment has been the roughly $4 billion it will spend from 2016-2018 in improving the company’s e-commerce platform and physical stores, while bolstering the link between the two,” according to a Forbes article.

The following techniques are succeeding for the big-box retailer, Forbes reports:

  • Giving customers the option to buy online but pick up products in store.
  • Providing “customers delivery data and estimates based on their locations.”
  • Managing orders through a system that “will help balance store and web inventories, as well as enabling buy-online, pickup in-store customers to choose the store with the shortest delivery time.”
  • Offering an “easy-to-use website and mobile shopping platform that will make the customer experience more seamless and allow Home Depot to better collect customer data.”

An improving U.S. housing market is contributing to Home Depot’s successes. Yet technology, ordering and delivery strategies are among the reasons for Home Depot’s current growth trajectory, according to Forbes.

“Home Depot is using its wealth of data and tech-enhanced supply chain to get customers the products they want, at a price they’re willing to pay, all while ensuring that its inventory and shipping costs are as low as possible—a sure way to boost margins,” the article says.

About Kate Klein

Kate is profiles editor for Hardware Retailing magazine. She reports on news and industry events and writes about retailers' unique contributions to the independent home improvement sector. She graduated from Cedarville University in her home state of Ohio, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English and minored in creative writing. She loves being an aunt, teaching writing to kids, running, reading, farm living and, as Walt Whitman says, traveling the open road, “healthy, free, the world before me.”

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