the client
Meet tottus
Falabella is one of the largest retail and financial services companies in Latin America, with more than 500 retail locations across Latin America.Tottus is their flagship supermarket chain, focused on quality and a premium in-store experience. Unfortunately their online grocery delivery was not cutting the mustard.
The existing online shopping experience was mired in technical issues, and while customers were “adding to cart” they weren’t completing orders. We needed to elevate it to the level of their in-store experience — and do it across two different countries. This was critical in a market where grocery delivery is growing fast, with competitors that could quickly steal away customers.
This massive project involved the Tech, Design, Marketing and Logistics teams in order to deliver a truly great shopping experience.
The first thing that stood out during discovery is that most customers that bought online never came back.
Not only that, a ton of customers that went through the entire shopping process would abandon their cart right before payment. After talking to them, we quickly realized that these customers did not trust the site.
All these issues were losing Tottus more than 70% of their long-term customers.
No indication that products were replaced or not available.
There were no updates on order status or changes.
Nowhere to input preferences (like choosing how ripe they wanted their bananas).
There’s nothing worse than placing an order than getting a call saying “We don’t have that in stock.”To avoid any more awkward calls or half-delivered orders, we designed the UX with the Stock and Logistics teams to ensure every item ordered was an item on the shelf.Every online shopping trip starts by asking for a customer’s location, ensuring every single thing on the screen matches the in-store stock. We also created graceful ways to replace items, especially for products that frequently went out of stock.
Supermarkets and promotions go together like peanut butter and jelly. One of our goals was to give the marketing team control over all content so they could add coupons, new campaigns, or contribute to the new recipes section.To keep it easy, we created a modular design system so new pages and assets could be published in a minute while maintaining the site’s design and functionality.
Annoyed by this process, the Marketing team ended up editing copy on the site via Google Tag Manager. Which is as creative as it is horrifying.So we scrapped that process and created a new CMS that let the Marketing teams write, preview, schedule, review and publish all pricing, promotions and copy without going through the Engineering team at all.By building accessible tools, we were able to streamline systems and prevent inventory errors — without any of the red tape.
If we wanted the new UX to work across a multitude of systems, it was necessary to migrate to a headless ecommerce infrastructure to stay agile.We ended up choosing CommerceTools, an API-first ecommerce platform that could easily be integrated with Tottus’s systems, as well as Contentful, a great CMS for helping manage content across all their products.By tying all this together with Typescript, React, Next.JS, and a handful of APIs coupled with a CDN, we were able to ship a blazing fast architecture that could handle all their stock and logistics complexity in a few milliseconds, helping create a great customer experience.
The site and app quickly became Tottus’s best performing stores.
Frustrated users and abandoned carts became a thing of the past.
With its new digital-first strategy, Tottus increased market share by more than 50%.
Tech Consultant for Falabella Labs
Tottus"Aerolab's talent for creating compelling user experiences that drive conversion is unparalleled. They helped transform a complex eCommerce experience into an intuitive interface that was both beautiful and easy to use."
Soon after launching Tottus, we started working on FPay, a wallet from the Falabella group focused on fast peer-to-peer payments.By taking advantage of their massive retail presence, we were able to quickly build an app featured in-store to millions of customers. A helpful tool for all, a perfect brand move for Falabella.
Manager of TI Digital Payments
FPay"I'm impressed with how Aerolab has helped level up our team with their design and engineering expertise. Their skill has been key in helping make this project a success."
