Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world, has for the past few years successfully embraced a digital transformation. In Chile, for instance, it set up in 2015 a B2E ecommerce channel for employees, partners and their friends and families, one which VTEX has supported from the very beginning. Recently, Nestlé’s B2E strategy entered a whole new realm by trying out the latest commerce trend: live shopping.
A space to experiment
Nestlé’s business-to-employee store is called Despensa Contigo, which more or less translates to “pantry with you”. The value proposition is therefore clear: quickly and easily get everything you need for your daily meals from a virtual pantry filled with the best products in town. The giant also takes care of the last-mile delivery, ensuring the perfect conditions for special items like ice cream and chocolate.
Much like any other B2E online store, this one is also closed to the public. In other words, in order to access the site via the B2E portal, customers need to be pre-registered in a database, for now exclusive to employees and partners and their families and friends. To streamline that process, Nestlé is making use of advanced permission settings in the VTEX Master Data module that can grant access to both individuals or entire corporations. Upscaling the Despensa Contigo store thus became a piece of cake across the years.
Indeed, similar to plenty of other enterprises, Nestle’s ecommerce accelerated rapidly when COVID-19 triggered an avalanche of online shopping. To be more specific, from 2019 to 2020, Despensa Contigo registered a YoY growth of 128%. The wonderful aspect here was that, unlike companies that could not keep up with the demand for online sales, Nestlé was able to grow steadily thanks to the solid ecommerce foundation set in the years before.
Overall, since its inception, the digital store has grown more than 10 times. To protect and maintain that trend, Despensa Contigo has recently migrated to VTEX IO, our low-development commerce platform that allows Nestlé to elevate its customer experience.
“This is a whole new world. My expectations are to keep growing and keep adding new things. We have to improve a lot, but we’re ready to experiment.”
Camila Rencoret Vilafranca, Direct-to-Consumer Manager at Nestlé Chile
And that’s exactly the beauty of B2E ecommerce — there’s room for experimentation. With a lower customer base and fewer associated risks in a restricted environment, it’s the perfect place for testing out the latest commerce craze, making mistakes and, most importantly, learning from the experience. That’s exactly why Despensa Contigo, which is affectionately known as Despensa Lab inside the company, tackled live shopping.
This experimentation space is powered by AWS Cloud Services in partnership with VTEX. With AWS, retailers tap flexible, elastic cloud services that easily scale up or down depending on demand, for instance.
“Just because the site is closed to the public, it does not mean we cannot do cool things and bring in new technology. Shoppers expect you to surprise them and make them feel special. We must do that regardless of our site’s nature.”
Camila Rencoret Vilafranca, Direct-to-Consumer Manager at Nestlé Chile
The live shopping experience
Before taking the matters into its own hands, Nestlé Chile was not exactly a stranger to live shopping. It had previously participated in a session hosted by Jumbo, the biggest Chilean grocery chain and a fellow VTEX customer. With an appetite for more and gauging it might be the future of ecommerce, it then decided to replicate the idea.
Nestlé Chile’s first live shopping event took place on the 20th of December 2021, right in time for some delicious holiday cooking. A chef was invited to prepare three courses with products from the digital store that were highlighted below the video using a clickable carousel block. That way, customers could buy whatever the chef used in the recipe with just a few clicks.
But that’s not all! Thanks to the live chat feature, the audience could react and interact in real time with the content and guest. The picture-in-picture (PiP) feature of VTEX’s live shopping solution also allowed visitors to minimize the live video in a corner of their screens and to continue watching the event while browsing the site or even adding products to the cart.
When it comes to KPIs, the strategy proved to be a great success. Thanks to some email marketing, SMS marketing and word-of-mouth, the CPG giant welcomed 187 unique viewers, a great number for a closed website. Out of the total, approximately 80% stayed until the end of the 90-minute event, in part incentivized by the giveaway of three air fryers.
The event also had 2766 likes and 1839 comments throughout its duration, showcasing increased engagement rates that are not otherwise possible. Live shopping is, from this perspective, an exciting and innovative way to get closer to clients.
Moreover, during the event and in the hours right after, sessions increased by 451%, orders by 269% and revenue by 206% compared to the average day of the previous two weeks. Turns out live shopping also delivers concrete results and improvements in conversion rates.
The challenge ahead
Through this session, Nestlé has validated the live shopping strategy. Now, the company is entertaining new, improved events, as well as ways to embed the existing blueprint into the channels of proprietary brands and even those of partners as a co-marketing strategy.
The task is not that easy, though — after all, there’s only so much you can do with food and drinks with the screen as an obstacle. It’s not quite like doing live shopping with consumer electronics or clothes, cases in which you can deep dive into how they work or how they look. But Nestlé loves a good challenge and is already getting creative. It goes without saying, VTEX is excited to assist on the journey.
