In recent years marketplaces have grown a lot because the same convenience offered by offline shopping malls, where you can find practically everything, marketplaces have it, with the big difference of being online so that you can do it from the comfort of your home.
Marina Online Chile case study
Grupo Marina is a group of malls in Chile with four shopping centers in Santiago, Viña del Mar, Curicó and Concepción. After 20 years of working in person, with the motivation to adapt to the new ways of shopping, the company decided to bet on a marketplace .
In this way, stores will be able to showcase their brands through this new digital channel, available 24/7 every day of the year, thus complementing traditional face-to-face sales. This will increase customer service capacity, promote security and solve capacity control limitations. Security, care and time optimization are some of the benefits of this new system.
Client’s need
Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, the company needed to adapt to the new ways of shopping and develop a site in marketplace format (https://www.marinaonline.cl/) on the VTEX platform that would allow them to have an online environment to offer the products of the physical stores. In other words, they wanted to group and sell in one place the products of their sellers.
Problem
Being a marketplace, they needed to have sellers that offered their catalog within the site, but not all sellers that had a physical store within the shopping malls had the technological structure to be able to integrate to the VTEX store, so the project represented a great challenge.
Solution provided by Known Online
Known Online performed the following tasks to solve the client’s need:
- VTEX to VTEX integrations: With those mall stores that already had an online environment in a VTEX store, VTEX to VTEX integrations were made and basically the catalog, prices, attributes, filters and all product data were incorporated into the Marina marketplace store. This data is automatically incorporated into the marketplace store at marinaonline.cl.
- Training: Customer trainings were conducted when entering the world of Ecommerce which included training in the use of the VTEX tool itself and advice for the integration to future sellers to its platform for both VTEX sellers and non-VTEX sellers to gain autonomy.
- Use of the Known Online Seller Center: In the physical stores that did not have a VTEX store what was done was to make available the Known Online seller center where they are automatically given an environment where they can enable users for their sellers with different roles, access levels and with different functionalities enabled. In this way sellers can quickly upload their catalogs, inventory and prices manually or massively and our Seller Center automatically integrates with the marketplace in VTEX uploading all products in an organized and automated way. This allows to expand the number of sellers and facilitate the execution of the basic processes in a marketplace. In addition, each seller can see the record of the sales they made on the portal through the marketplace, they can check the reports, statistics and their current account. This is very important because a marketplace charges commission to its sellers, so within the same portal and the marketplace itself they can see how much they sold and which are the crossed transactions between them to have clear accounts between both parties. On the other hand, it allows the marketplace to facilitate the inclusion of more sellers in its portal, to have them in a more organized way and to integrate their catalogs, prices and stock automatically to the marketplace store, achieving an effective management of the daily processes of the sellers.
- Analytics: The entire Analytics structure of the marketplace was implemented so that administrators can have complete data on how people use the platform and be able to make business decisions based on the data that users leave when interacting with the site.
- Integration of logistics systems: This allows the mall to fully automate the process of in-store pick-up, pick-up to receive purchases in the parking lot without getting out of the car, and home delivery.
Results
- The proposal provided and implemented by Known Online, completely solved the client’s need since the Marinaonline.cl marketplace is now operational and all its sellers (both VTEX and non-VTEX) are selling within its platform with all processes automated and integrated with each other.
- The development of the solution and the entire automation process was completed in 90 days.
