Lowe's takes on Home Depot with upgraded shopping experience

Home improvement stores like Lowe's and Home Depot offer a fairly daunting shopping experience for homeowners, or really anyone who's not experienced in building or repairing things. Satisfaction, however, has been improving."Nearly two-thirds (64%) of home improvement retailer shoppers say they would definitely shop at their store again, an increase of nine percentage points from 2024, according to the JD Power 2025 U.S.

Home Improvement Retailer Satisfaction Study. That still leaves a third of shoppers at least somewhat unsatisfied, but both Lowe's and Home Depot have improved their brick-and-mortar experiences."This increase is due to the proactivity of employees, as they are taking more initiative to keep the stores clean, greeting and assisting customers, as well as an increase in customers shopping on the retailer website before visiting the store," JD Power added.Both chains' websites, however, can be equally daunting, and Lowe's plans to take bold steps in response.Lowe's bets big on website personalizationMy wife and I just built a house and need to add everything from shades to light fixtures, along with countless other things. Navigating the Lowe's and Home Depot websites presents a challenge because of the scope of both sites.It's also frustrating to find the item you want, then learn that it's not in stock at a store that's convenient to you. Lowe's aims to fix that with its latest online improvements."Lowe's is expanding a feature that uses customer data — things like location, browsing behavior and past purchases — to personalize its website. The feature is now being rolled out to a percentage of customers — though Lowe’s declined to specify how many — with a broader launch planned by the end of the year," according to Modern Retail.The home-improvement chain has been testing these features since late 2025."The personalization will show up through modular content blocks on Lowe’s website that can be swapped, reordered or customized based on customer behavior. Lowe’s homepage is made up of different sections, or 'modules,' such as featured banners and product recommendation areas, that can either stay the same for everyone or change based on the shopper," Modern Retail added. Lowe's Executive Vice President of Merchandising William Boltz spoke broadly about his company's efforts to "meet the customer where they want to be met. Both online and in-store," during the chain's fourth-quarter earnings call."We're excited about the... innovation that we have across the store. The merchant teams have done just a really nice job of bringing new, exclusive, and innovative values that we can put in front of the consumer," he added.Consumers want more personalization"Seventy-one percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen," according to data from McKinsey & Company. That leads to stronger results for the companies that make the needed investments. "Personalization drives performance and better customer outcomes. Companies that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts," added McKinsey.That was backed up by a study from CommerceNext, in partnership with The Commerce Experience Collective (CommX), Bizrate and Coresight Research, which found that consumers appreciate personalization marketing but are concerned about data privacy."The study finds that 66% of consumers prefer to buy from stores that know them and their preferences, and 60% of those surveyed also agreed that relevant product recommendations were important to them. However, 87% of these consumers are very concerned about how retailers are using their personal information and data, while 67% will only share data if they know it is being safely stored," the data showed. Lowe's stores are more than 100,000 square feet in size.Shutterstock Analysts respond to Lowe's personalization effortsAs the data shows, retail analysts and experts acknowledge that consumers like personalization, but have privacy concerns."Customers don’t expect personalization, but they welcome relevant and unobtrusive personalization that helps them with their purchase journey. In the case of Lowe’s, this is less about blunt recommendations of what to buy, and more about building a context around the customer to ensure that what’s being shown is relevant," GlobalData Managing Director Neil Saunders shared on RetailWire. He sees the changes as being useful, not obtrusive."For example, people in Southern Arizona do not want to see snow shovels and have a much longer gardening season than people in Massachusetts. It’s basic, but sensible stuff," he added.His Brain Trust colleague Brad Halverson, who serves as Principal of Clearbrand CX, thinks Lowe's needed to make these changes."With an estimated 40,000 SKUs in store, and with some customers being contractors while others are general shoppers, the strategy in getting closer to what customers are hoping to accomplish helps result in better experiences at Lowe's," he wrote on RetailWire.Related: Shoe brand once worth $4B closes all stores, avoids bankruptcy