Best Buy is a major consumer-electronics retailer that serves customers through physical stores and digital channels.
Best Buy wanted to extend the in-store shopping experience across 130 physical stores into a digital environment. But buying electronics wasn’t simply transactional. Customers were used to exploring products, comparing options, and relying on knowledgeable employees to help them decide.
They needed a digital experience that gave customers the information and self-service tools they needed to explore and purchase a broad range of electronics, while keeping the experience intuitive and fast.
Showcasing an extensive product catalog presented another challenge. Limited bandwidth and high data costs meant repeatedly downloading thousands of product images could create a slow and expensive customer experience. Atimi preloaded the bulk of the product inventory images into the app. As the catalog grew, only a smaller number of new images needed to be added.
Behind the scenes, the app also had to connect Best Buy’s extensive product catalog with a complex backend environment. The experience needed to feel simple to the customer, even when the technology supporting it wasn’t.
After the initial app launched, the retail organization entered a brand transition involving Future Shop and Best Buy. Because the transition didn’t happen across every store at the same time, the digital product needed to support both branded experiences while preserving its existing functionality.
The complexity was greater because the transition wasn’t happening everywhere at once. Best Buy needed the flexibility to support different branded experiences, content, services, and store requirements from the underlying digital product. The transition also required Atimi to account for different backend systems associated with the two retail brands while preserving the app’s customer-facing functionality.
Atimi conducted user research to understand what customers expected from the digital shopping experience.
That research shaped the product strategy. Instead of simply digitizing a point-of-sale system, Atimi reimagined how customers could explore electronics independently, access useful product information, and move through the purchasing process quickly and intuitively.
The result was a user-centered digital experience that translated the strengths of Best Buy’s physical retail environment into a new channel.
To make a large product catalog accessible without forcing customers to repeatedly download thousands of images, Atimi preloaded most of Best Buy’s product inventory images into the app.
As the catalog evolved, only a smaller number of new images needed to be added.
This helped Atimi deliver the visually rich shopping experience customers needed while designing around the very real technical limitations affecting performance and usability.
When Best Buy’s requirements changed, Atimi’s designers and developers held problem-solving workshops to rethink the architecture rather than simply patching the existing product.
Atimi developed a white-label approach that allowed the app to support separate Best Buy and Future Shop experiences. Accent colors, text, endpoints, and web services could be configured for the relevant brand and store requirements.
At the time, this wasn’t a standard development approach. It gave Best Buy greater flexibility during its transition and created an architecture that could support future growth and expansion.
Atimi helped Best Buy translate a complex physical retail experience into a digital channel while addressing customer experience, bandwidth, backend integration, and brand-transition challenges.
The digital experience was designed to complement the customer experience across Best Buy’s extensive physical retail footprint.
The app was an early mobile retail experience designed to showcase a broad range of consumer electronics and provide customers with accessible product information and self-service tools.
Atimi developed a flexible architecture that could support multiple branded experiences, including different visual elements, content, endpoints, and web services. The approach was innovative at a time when white-label app architecture was not yet a standard development practice.
The new architecture enabled the required branded experiences while maintaining the app’s functionality and marketplace integration.
The white-label architecture gave Best Buy greater flexibility and helped establish a foundation for growth and expansion into new markets.
The technology has changed dramatically since this project, but the business challenges haven’t. Enterprise leaders still need to modernize customer experiences without disrupting the business, connect complex systems behind simple digital experiences, and build technology flexible enough to adapt as customer and business needs evolve.
Atimi continues to solve those same kinds of complex problems today.
“Atimi really understood what we were trying to do. We didn’t just need an app. We needed to take what worked about the in-store experience and make it work digitally. And when our needs changed, they didn’t just patch things together. They came back with a completely different approach that gave us the flexibility we needed. They were great at taking a complicated problem and finding a smart, practical way to solve it.”
