Kingfisher keeps the faith with dropshipping specialist Virtualstock as it inks three-year contract extension

Kingfisher, the owner of B&Q and Screwfix, is renewing its retail technology partnership with Virtualstock, a dropshipping and curated marketplace SaaS platform whose other clients include Aldi, John Lewis, and Argos.

It has inked a three-year contract, with Virtualstock’s tech being used to support 1,100 B&Q stores across eight different countries in Europe.

Paul White, Commercial Director at B&Q, says: “Virtualstock technology wraps around our existing IT infrastructure enabling us to scale our online offer at pace, introducing new products, ranges, and markets.”

“Dropship is a route that enables us to build a broad portfolio of products giving our customers both choice and accessibility. We look forward to continuing to work in partnership with Virtualstock as we continue to expand our offer and grow our online business.”

A spokesperson for Virtualstock says: “We’re delighted to announce the renewal of our strategic partnership with Kingfisher for a further three years. B&Q has selected Virtualstock as its platform of choice to extend online product ranges, offering customers more choice and driving revenue.”

“The dropship channel allows B&Q to keep control over its range and ensure a great customer experience.”

“Our consultative and flexible approach has enabled B&Q to expand its dropship channel without the requirement for internal IT involvement or architectural changes.”

Data and AI

Kingfisher last week announced full year results for FY23/24, with Tom Betts, Group Data Director, taking to social media to flag up progress being made on his side of the business.

In a LinkedIn post, he said: “Respect and congratulations to all teams contributing to these results. I am proud of the huge progress we've made together on building data capabilities as we "build a data led customer experience" under the Powered by Kingfisher strategy.”

He added: “We're using data and AI to drive top-line growth, streamline operations, strengthen margins and generate new income streams. This has required substantial collaboration between business, tech and data teams across group and our retail banners.”

Kingfisher also owns DIY stores in France, Poland, Spain and Portugal under the Castorama and Brico Dépôt brands.

Highlights from the last 12 months include:

Developing in-house algorithms for product recommendations and personalisation and implementing them at Screwfix, B&Q, Castorama and Brico Depot Romania. These are driving >100% improvement vs. previous solutions and at B&Q are now powering c. 10% of e-commerce sales, according to Betts.

He also highlighted how Kingfisher is enabling transparency over its supply chain with an end-to-end visibility tool.

This provides teams with rich and timely data to take action to reduce inventory levels and shorten replenishment cycles, resulting in better product availability for customers. It is now available in all markets.

Other highlights:

Deploying new AI enabled tools to optimise promotions and pricing at B&Q.

These enable commercial teams to forecast promotional performance and assess the best promotional mechanics by simulating different scenarios.

“We're also applying AI to optimise clearance pricing in-store and online. These are contributing to improved sales growth, better sell-through and stronger margins,” Betts said.

Strengthening sales demand forecasting capabilities with machine learning at Castorama France. These are driving substantial improvements in forecast accuracy and efficiency.

Generating new retail media income streams from vendors who want to purchase advertising and use data to improve their offering. “We've launched propositions for Castorama France, Brico Dépôt, and B&Q. Revenue has the potential to reach 3% of total Group e-commerce sales.”

Finally, building Athena - an in-house orchestration framework allowing Kingfisher to integrate and manage multiple GenAI tools quickly and safely.

Betts concluded: “Athena allowed us to launch our first customer facing GenAI product - a virtual assistant "Hello Casto". We'll have more to share soon. All of these use cases are powered by our group wide data platform Nucleus which is providing simpler and faster access to data.”