Delivery times are one of the most important deciding factors when buying online. And around 41% of customers are willing to pay for same day delivery. So: what if you found a way to provide a seamless same-day delivery experience while increasing the percentage of upselling in your business? That’s exactly what happened to Victoria’s Secret in Chile.
The company —operated by Axo and a VTEX client since 2020— implemented click and collect as the first step of their omnichannel solution, and the results have been great: an unexpectedly high adoption by customers has been accompanied by a big percentage of in-store purchases during pick-ups. Clients have also raved about the convenience and speed of this option.
Axo Chile’s ecommerce operation talked to us about the experience during implementation, the success behind the solution and what’s next for one of the most innovative retail companies in the South American country.
The challenge of evolution
In the first half of 2020, Axo Chile had some changes in mind for the future of their ecommerce business, and it knew that it would have to replatform in order to achieve all of its goals. Axo Mexico suggested VTEX, mainly because of the robustness of its promotion engine.
“The promotion module was capable of having the discounts that we need to run, which are aligned with the brand from the United States. This was key, and when we approached Ecomsur, our full-commerce provider, they also mentioned VTEX as a robust engine for our needs”.
Thania Contreras, Ecommerce Manager at Axo
Victoria’s Secret Chile migrated to VTEX in October 2020, after only four months of having started the project. Contreras pointed out that channel integration (of stores and ecommerce) was one of the most important trends for the group’s future.
“We ship products directly from stores, and that has a lot of client-facing benefits. It’s something very satisfying for us, and that we do better than other stores, because we create synergies”.
Thania Contreras, Ecommerce Manager at Axo
In the interest of this integration, Axo implemented, together with VTEX and Ecomsur, a click and collect solution for their brick-and-mortar stores in Chile. The option was launched in February 2022, and was quickly adopted by a high volume of customers.
Consumer adoption
What started as a project focused on a better customer experience, quickly became one of the most popular delivery methods, which drove foot traffic to the stores and raised sales for the company.
“Click and collect has been growing from the very beginning, and we’ve been looking for better ways to measure upselling. Today, in-store pick up represents around a quarter of online orders and a significant percentage of those customers end up buying other products.”
Thania Contreras, Ecommerce Manager at Axo
Contreras revealed that the group hasn’t done much, yet, to promote upselling amongst its store employees, which means that the current rate of upsell has happened organically. Special sales have brought peaks of up to 38% to the upsell percentage. This is encouraging, and represents a significant growth from the period immediately after launch, when upselling was barely in the double digits.
Axo has feedback from the brand in the US that its current performance is good, compared to other markets. Now, salespeople from Victoria’s Secret Chile have clear goals for upselling, and Axo has even set up short contests between representatives to promote best practices.
Right place, right time
The high adoption rate for Victoria’s Secret click and collect offering is the result of many circumstances: some of them built by the company itself, and some of them a reflection of the Chilean market.
First of all, Axo has very short delivery times. The company promises your order is ready to collect in a day –at most–, and the processing period is as short as three hours. Sometimes, if a store isn’t too busy, it might even allow a customer to collect orders right after they place their online order.
This is extremely attractive for customers who are used to waiting between three and five days for home delivery from online shopping orders, depending on how busy the store is. Victoria’s Secret also has physical stores in central and very recognizable locations, which helps with the perception of convenience.
With these elements, the percentage of clients that choose to pick their orders in store has stayed healthy, even when the company offers free shipping. During seasonal sales, this percentage also grows.
The challenge of a better experience
Axo is working to improve ship-from-store, as well as the return process for customers. The group knows that omnichannel is the way into the future, and are betting on it.
Contreras highlighted the ease with which you can add new functionalities to the VTEX platform, and mentioned Live Shopping as one of the main examples. This flexibility, along with the positive experiences during previous implementations, has turned into a driving force to push the company into the adoption of further innovations.
Thanks to VTEX’s partnership with Amazon Web Services, Grupo Axo can leverage scalability and flexibility to apply to any new feature they would like to add to their website. With AWS, retailers tap flexible, elastic cloud services that easily scale up or down depending on demand, for instance.
What form will these innovations take? You’ll have to wait and see, but Axo is sure that Victoria’s Secret Chile, and Bath and Body Works Chile are in the right place to keep pushing forward and lead the ecommerce experiences in their respective markets.
