Retail

The challenge

An 11 year old supermarket chain with 10 stores, 3,000 employees, and 500,000 monthly customers had entered the year 2021 without a real presence online. The extent of their digital footprint was a small amount of WhatsApp orders backed by manual processes.

The business decided it was time to join in on the competition. They selected a new eCommerce platform, VTEX, and relied on Digibee to integrate their new and existing systems.

Central challenges included:

• Company was already late to deliver on buyer behavior shifts online – making speed to implementation a top priority
• Total inventory exceeded 15,000 products – this required an integration layer between existing systems containing product listings to save on time
• Stock is the same for digital and in-person inventory, requiring near-constant updating and visibility

The Objective

The intention was a rapid, continuous and profitable launch into the digital space. The project objectives included:

• Digitize as quickly and easily as possible
• Integration of the new commerce platform with existing systems that store catalog information, inventory data, and product pricing
• Optimize data transfer speed to support daily loading of large catalog and frequent (every two minutes) updates
• Streamline the processing of pick-up orders, integrating customer and order data for a fast and accurate interaction every time

The plan

The supermarket chain chose VTEX as its e-commerce platform and Digibee for its integration platform. Digibee was selected primarily for its platform model and accompanying support.

The business model decided upon was that each online sale would be serviced by a regionalized store dependent on the customer’s location. Digibee performed the integration store-by-store successfully – automating the upload of catalog products, stock quantity, and price information to the e-commerce platform.

The Outcome

The project took less than three months from planning, design, and implementation. After just 30 days in operation, online sales increased tenfold..

15,000 inventory items are loaded and updated in the platform every two minutes. This has a positive impact on visibility for the online orders and for physical store management. The integration not only allowed online sales to be quickly made available to customers, but also serves as the baseline for processes involving other partners.

“The success of the operation has seen online sales grow tenfold since the platform’s first month of operation, with a tendency for even faster growth in the future.”

Senior IT Manager

Results included:

• Greater agility in the operation
• Reliability of stock, catalogs and price information
• 100% visibility of the transactions performed
• Platform monitoring, with hourly managerial summaries

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.

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