From Ecommerce to Digital Transformation: Unicentro, VTEX’s Success Story in Paraguay
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Unicentro —Paraguay’s most important fashion department store— decided to turn crisis into opportunity and launched an online platform so that its customers could purchase the brand’s products from anywhere in the country, just a click away.
With over 33 years in the market, 282 employees, an assortment of 300,000 products, and 4 branches in Asunción, Lambaré, and San Lorenzo, the company launched its ecommerce with the support of VTEX in November 2020.
Accelerated Steps Toward Digitalization
Since its launching, ecommerce users have grown by 440% and sessions have risen by more than 450%. The number of sessions per user has also improved by 1.52% and as the months go by, the conversion rate has also increased under the current circumstances.
“Unicentro had a pressing need to create an additional sales channel to sell more and considering that the world continues to advance digitally, we had to keep up with what our customers were expecting and waiting from us. The platform implementation solved these concerns.”
Guido Calabrese, Unicentro’s CEO.
Calabrese also listed why Unicentro chose VTEX as a technology partner: “In 2020, we sought for a comprehensive platform to help us drive online sales. VTEX has been a great help throughout the process, particularly in terms of follow-up, training, and, above all, agent support. Because it all comes down to user experience in terms of navigability, we found that VTEX was precisely a trouble-free platform designed to provide a simple and easy shopping and navigation experience for the user.”
For VTEX, on the other hand, one of the main challenges was to optimize the time-to-market for the ecommerce launch.
According to Josué Aveiro Ferreira, Head of Sales for Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia at VTEX, “Achieving the desired performance in this area involved a series of steps: Together with the certified partner, we designed the process from scratch and determined which players would be involved (purchasing, marketing, and ecommerce areas).
Then, we studied the product (website) we wanted to launch and established the market needs before working on the design. Once the design was approved, it was time to develop the website and run the corresponding tests. Finally, with all players’ approval, we launched it within a deployment turn-around time of fewer than three months, and also tested user acceptance.”
Right from the outset, Unicentro had defined that it desired to be an omnichannel store, this means that what happened in the brick-and-mortar store was equally important as what happened in the ecommerce.
“This approach involved a comprehensive strategy, where digital, advertising, and commercial needs were involved.”
Guido Calabrese, Unicentro’s CEO.
Among the features and attributes of the VTEX platform, Calabrese highlighted the SmartCheckout to simplify the entire final purchase journey, Social Selling that allowed the sales force to market via WhatsApp, the Order Management System (OMS) that manages the complex logic of orders and logistics, the API First architecture and the VTEX IO development framework. They all supported the integration of Unicentro’s card and the constant innovation of the user’s shopping experience, as well as the native integration of payment methods, marketing automation tools, analytics, and more.
The number of orders increased by 1,500% since the ecommerce launch.
The Cultural Transformation Challenge
Unicentro offers free-of-charge pickup service in its 4 stores, customized WhatsApp sales so that the customer can visit the store without leaving home and a diligent delivery service that covers the entire national territory.
“As for so many brands, the pandemic marked a before and after for Unicentro. The health crisis tested the adaptability of both the store and the team involved before taking a leap into the future. It’s no longer just about going to the store and shopping. Now the challenge is to offer a variety of features and solutions for the customer to purchase products when and how he expects.”
Guido Calabrese, Unicentro’s CEO.
All of this cultural transformation and technology comes from VTEX’s partnership with AWS. AWS is a smart, modern, connected platform that helps turn customer and business data into actionable insights quickly.
