Coca-Cola’s DTC ecommerce operation in Chile bubbles up 500% in 2020
From a mouth-watering elixir served in 1886 in downtown Atlanta to the world’s largest nonalcoholic beverage company – that’s the journey of the Coca-Cola Company and its iconic brands beloved by billions of soft drink aficionados. Throughout time, Coca-Cola and its partners made sure to sell not just products, but an experience. And the miCoca-Cola.cl direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecommerce operation in Chile certainly fits the bill.
Customer insights, the effervescence of DTC
Since 1946, Coca-Cola Andina has been a Chilean bottling partner of the Coca-Cola Company, manufacturing and supplying Coke and other beverages to numerous retailers across the country. However, many decades later, Coca-Cola Andina found itself between a rock and hard place when it came to knowing what end-consumers desire: the Coca-Cola Company could only advise from a global, faraway standpoint, whereas supermarkets had full control over touchpoints with the buyers. As a bottler, Coca-Cola Andina didn’t have first-hand customer insights to leverage on the local market – so it set out to acquire them with a DTC ecommerce operation.
Going the DTC route was highly feasible because Coca-Cola Andina already had a robust distribution operation that it could use for a lightning-fast last-mile delivery process. Moreover, setting up a digital store freed Coca-Cola Andina from any potential investment in a brick-and-mortar presence and even offered more detailed insights than in a traditional environment, not to mention full control over the branding experience. Thanks to the multiple advantages of DTC, it comes as no surprise that the business model has been increasingly adopted by CPG brands worldwide, propelling it towards phenomenal growth.
Thus, Coca-Cola Andina quickly partnered with Ecomsur and VTEX. After a three-month implementation process, it launched miCoca-Cola.cl in December 2016. In the beginning, the site served only a few areas in the Santiago region, but as delivery locations increased and promotional alliances with partners were made, so did the number of customers.
“We knew that we had a strong and reliable service that we wanted people to try out. And we knew that when people tried our service, they were going to come back.”
Daniel López, Ecommerce Manager at Coca-Cola Andina
