Maisons du Monde redesigns its payments with Primer

The world has fallen in love with interior design and transforming the spaces we live in. You just need to look at the social trends for evidence of this. The hashtag #InteriorDesign has amassed more than 40 billion views and counting on TikTok. While social influencers focused on interior design, like Kelly Wearstler, Becki Owens, and Steve Cordony, have hundreds of thousands of followers. 

Select brands that excel in delivering quality, variety, and value to individuals seeking to revamp their living spaces are fueling this revolution. Among them is Maisons du Monde. Known for its eclectic and globally inspired collections, it has become a beacon for home decor enthusiasts, selling online and in-store in 11 European countries. 

However, Maisons du Monde understands that maintaining its position demands more than just offering sought-after products. It entails crafting a holistic brand experience that resonates with customers, whether they’re casually browsing or ready to purchase.

The responsibility for building this experience sits with Jérémy Lechardeur. Jérémy is in charge of the technology stack that shapes Maisons du Monde's omnichannel retail experience.

We spoke with Jérémy to learn more about how Maisons du Monde is building a world-class omnichannel retail experience, why payments have become front and center to their strategy, the importance of having a strategic payments partner, and what Maisons du Monde hopes to achieve now that Primer is on its team. 

Jérémy, over the last 18-24 months, payments have become a significant topic for Maisons du Monde. Why is that?

You’re correct; payments have become a big topic over the past two years. Several factors are driving this, but fundamentally, it boils down to enhancing the customer experience. We want our customers to have the best experience when they engage with us in-store and online, and payments, especially online payments, are a huge part of that. 

The challenge we've encountered is that to create those experiences we've had to expand our payment stack, creating complexities that challenge our ability to deliver a consistent, top-tier customer experience.

For example, we offer account-to-account payments to customers who fill their carts with Maisons du Monde products. However, if they also include products from our third-party marketplace in their cart, then we can’t offer account-to-account payments, and we have to make sure it doesn’t appear as an option at the checkout. 

Building that logic and ensuring it works correctly is a significant undertaking for the business, especially as we don’t have a large payments team. 

Another challenge is that we want to expand our range of payment options to meet the preferences of our customers across Europe. However, integrating just one payment method takes us a few months, meaning we can’t scale anywhere near as fast as we want. That’s not to mention the challenges we have with operational tasks like reconciliation now that we’re accepting multiple payment methods and using multiple payment processors. 

So, given the businesses’ ambitions and the pain payments were creating, we took a step back and asked if there was a better way forward. 

The answer to that question was Primer. 

We’re thrilled to have you on board and using Primer as your Unified Payment Infrastructure. Tell us about the selection process and why Primer stood out.

We’d identified a few providers who seemed to provide the capabilities we required and entered an RFP process. We involved as many people as possible on the journey; I believe around 35 people were involved overall, and Primer stood out to us for several reasons.

One of those is the technology. Primer is a modern platform built to deliver the flexibility and scalability a business like Maisons du Monde needs. It makes connecting new payment processors and payment methods simple. But what’s even more powerful is what you can do once you connect those payment services. For example, with just a few clicks in Universal Checkout, we can build all the logic necessary to ensure we present the correct payment mix to the customer based on what’s in their basket. And with workflows, we have a similar ability to build complex processing logic to give every payment the highest chance of success. 

Equally influential in our decision are the people at Primer. We’re not growing our payments team, so we wanted the partner we chose to be an extension of our team. This was fundamental, and Primer showed up, proving they'd be our partner at every stage of the process.

The bottom line is that we’re confident that Primer can solve all the challenges we face today and set the stage for turning payments into a strategic edge for Maisons du Monde.

What are your plans when you go live with Primer?

We’re going live with a selection of alternative payment methods first on Primer, including iDEAL and Bancontact. We'll then add our card flows and extend the range of payment methods we offer. This is critical because we can see that customers abandon their carts in certain markets if they don’t see their preferred payment method. By the end of the year, we’ll be using Primer for a significant percentage of our payment volume. 

As we add these new payment methods, we’ll also introduce one or two new payment processors. This is important as it will allow us to focus on optimization, use Primer workflows for smart routing, and explore its AI capabilities. 

We’ll also look at its commerce automation tools later this year and see what payment-adjacent applications we can use to drive operational excellence across the business. 

Maison du Monde is using Primer’s Headless Checkout. Why did you take this approach? 

The checkout must provide continuity to the customer experience. We pay significant attention to it to ensure it is simple, fast, and matches each customer’s buying habits. Because of that, we initially wanted to own the checkout page and build it within our tech stack. The downside of that approach is that it would require continual work from our engineering teams to maintain and update the checkout.

That’s why the Headless option Primer offers fits our needs perfectly. It gives us total control over the checkout page, allowing us to create the experiences we want with minimal engineering effort. At the same time, it will enable us to easily configure our payment methods and implement logic to show our customers the most relevant payment methods based on their location and what is in their cart.

The fact that we had these options is a testament to Primer's flexibility, which many other providers cannot offer. 

On the data side, you’ll be using Observability to monitor payment performance. What insights do you hope to gain? 

The primary use case here is to monitor performance across all our payment methods and processors in one dashboard. This is essential as we optimize our payment performance and monitor our payment flows for any issues.

Also, if we’ve added a payment method, we need to see how it’s doing and whether customers are using it. If not, we can decommission it. In the future, we plan to explore the observability API to bring our in-store data into the dashboard, giving us a single view of all our payments. 

‍How do you see the future with Primer as your payment partner?

I think we’re on a great path together. It’s been an excellent start. I’m sure the partnership will generate many opportunities as we build the solution and explore all the possibilities for more efficient payments and better customer experiences.

Get in touch to learn how Primer can help make payments a strategic growth level in your business.