Challenge

When Panasonic came to VTEX in 2018, they were looking to implement new business models, including an ecommerce store. At that time, there wasn’t much focus on the ecommerce website’s strategy. After the first lockdown due to Covid-19, in March 2020, the Panasonic team identified the need of putting more aggressive strategies to grow the brand’s online store into practice. 

“The first lockdown rerouted our strategies regarding ecommerce. There was a shift in mindset and a hurry to deliver. It was an inevitable change and VTEX jumped right in to help.”

Fábio Ribeiro, Marketing & Ecommerce Director at Panasonic Brazil

The goals were, above all, to improve usability and customer experience for both customers and employees, bettering scalability and revenue growth. The Panasonic website wasn’t SEO-optimized and they struggled with updating product information, having inventory visibility and improving logistics during the pandemic. 

And VTEX was the greatest partner to help Panasonic hit its goals.

Solution

Previously a VTEX Legacy customer for over 3 years, the decision to migrate Panasonic’s store to VTEX IO was something necessary to improve the shopping experience on its website. To be able to meet the customer’s need for online purchasing during the pandemic, the migration only took 4-month to happen. And to guarantee it was as seamless as possible for everyone, they ran several A/B tests during the entire migration process.

By migrating, there were significant improvements, mainly related to flexibility and agility. With VTEX IO, Panasonic was able to go beyond and build never thought before experiences like the award-winning PStore app. To build it, the team needed an open architecture that would allow them to build on top of the native capabilities, while  testing new functionalities and perfecting the user experience.

The app was launched in August 2020, five months after the first recommended lockdown started. The goal was to use VTEX’s Social Selling tool inside the application to have Panasonic consultants offering real-time customer service and creating shareable carts with clients. With that, sales associates were empowered to sell online while customers had access to personalized and more human service. 

All of this was enabled by VTEX’s composable architecture, where Panasonic could integrate data from all services in one place and have the freedom to compose custom apps. 

Through VTEX’s complete and composable platform, the company could easily integrate and connect third-party applications to improve the online shopping experience. In less than a week, Panasonic was able to offer new payment providers and complement product pages with reviews, videos and other functionalities that are helpful in boosting sales.

The results? As impressive as the implementation.

Results

Thanks to VTEX IO Development Platform and VTEX MACH (micro-service based, API-first, cloud-native and Headless) architecture, Panasonic was able to seamlessly make modifications to the website’s front-end without disrupting back-end processes. This makes both developers’ and marketing professionals’ lives easier, which also means a quicker testing period and shorter time-to-market. 

All of this has led to numerous results, including an increase of 15% in conversion rates on the website and a 5x increase in online store revenue when compared to the previous year. Panasonic also won two prizes for its ecommerce website. One was from EShopper, which granted the company a prize for having a 3-click buying process that leads customers faster to the checkout screen. The other was related to PStore and how the Panasonic Brazilian digital operation managed to keep over 300 sales consultants employed even during the lockdown crisis. 

We had good results in sales during the pandemic, especially in ecommerce, because we knew how to take advantage of this new way of buying and because of the high demand for products that improve life at home.

Fábio Ribeiro, Marketing & Ecommerce Director at Panasonic Brazil