The new shopping UX that increased sales of La Comer supermarket chain.
Grupo la Comer is a supermarket chain with an online store and more than 60 physical stores distributed throughout Mexico. Founded in 1930, it has presence in several states of the Mexican republic, mainly in the central region.
In 2002, Comercial Mexicana redefined its business strategy, aiming towards differentiation. This new approach resulted in the creation of its advertising mantra: ¿Vas al Súper o a La Comer? (Do you go to the supermarket or La Comer?), and the launch in 2006 of a revolutionary concept that has gained strong acceptance: City Market. Following the same philosophy, it introduced its supermarket concept in 2009, called Fresko.
In 2016, La Comer stores were opened based on the concept of hypermarket. These hypermarkets are focused on consumers located in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and are organized into sections such as groceries, perishables, prepared foods, general merchandise, and household articles.
Grupo La Comer has well-known proprietary brands, including Lafite (electronics and tablets), Golden Hills and KePrecio (sundries), Pet’s Club, and Farmacom.
La Comer mobile app
La Comer app was developed to open an additional sales channel providing the advantages of mobile services to millions of customers. To this end, the company’s systems area looked for a development platform with the objective of creating a convenient and easy-touse shopping app that could be executed on the client’s smartphones under iOS and Android platforms, also making available the delivery service at the store or at home.
Following the efforts of our Technology Partner Alpha Soluciones, GeneXus was selected to simplify the frontend development by taking advantage of the creation of a single model, and using GeneXu’s multiplatform generation techniques to program native applications and deploy them in both stores (App Store & Google play) with no need to have a particular code for each platform.
“From the technical point of view, we needed an application that was easy to use by our client and at the same time easy to maintain and scale by the development team, which would position us in the different application stores as an outstanding online shopping option,” says Víctor Posada Mendoza, head of E-COMMERCE systems development.
Posada also notes that in their previous experience native code for each of the platforms was developed. The change to having a technology that generated the code and allowed them to deploy specific native apps for each Operating System was extremely positive and represented an advantage that brought agility to the development process.
In addition, GeneXus accelerated the frontend development and simplified integration with backend services. Developers were able to focus on services and business rules with the ability to quickly deploy views using the tool.
«Changing to GeneXus added great value and speed to make modifications, or to implement a new feature or module, comments the development manager. Now we can show functional prototypes to key users faster, which in turn shortens our review, development and integration cycles. According to Posada’s estimations, this translates into 40 percent time savings in prototyping generation.»
Víctor Posada Mendoza. Head of e-commerce system development at La Comer.
The application was released in July 2018 in Google play and App Store. A few months after publication in the stores, it already had more than 10,000 downloads in both stores combined.
At present, 16 percent of all purchase orders are made through the app, which means that the customers´s; response has been very positive and surely this percentage will grow over time.
Clearly, opening this new sales channel has benefited customers by providing an agile and convenient service, and also benefited La Comer, which has experienced a sharp sales increase. That is why in the near future they plan to create more applications that enhance the purchasing experience, to be implemented on the sales floor to help effectively and accurately in the assembly and delivery of customer orders.
In 2016, La Comer stores were opened based on the concept of hypermarket. These hypermarkets are focused on consumers located in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and are organized into sections such as groceries, perishables, prepared foods, general merchandise, and household articles.
Grupo La Comer has well-known proprietary brands, including Lafite (electronics and tablets), Golden Hills and KePrecio (sundries), Pet’s Club, and Farmacom.
La Comer mobile app
La Comer app was developed to open an additional sales channel providing the advantages of mobile services to millions of customers. To this end, the company’s systems area looked for a development platform with the objective of creating a convenient and easy-touse shopping app that could be executed on the client’s smartphones under iOS and Android platforms, also making available the delivery service at the store or at home.
Following the efforts of our Technology Partner Alpha Soluciones, GeneXus was selected to simplify the frontend development by taking advantage of the creation of a single model, and using GeneXu’s multiplatform generation techniques to program native applications and deploy them in both stores (App Store & Google play) with no need to have a particular code for each platform.
“From the technical point of view, we needed an application that was easy to use by our client and at the same time easy to maintain and scale by the development team, which would position us in the different application stores as an outstanding online shopping option,” says Víctor Posada Mendoza, head of E-COMMERCE systems development.
Posada also notes that in their previous experience native code for each of the platforms was developed. The change to having a technology that generated the code and allowed them to deploy specific native apps for each Operating System was extremely positive and represented an advantage that brought agility to the development process.
In addition, GeneXus accelerated the frontend development and simplified integration with backend services. Developers were able to focus on services and business rules with the ability to quickly deploy views using the tool.
«Changing to GeneXus added great value and speed to make modifications, or to implement a new feature or module, comments the development manager. Now we can show functional prototypes to key users faster, which in turn shortens our review, development and integration cycles. According to Posada’s estimations, this translates into 40 percent time savings in prototyping generation.»
Víctor Posada Mendoza. Head of e-commerce system development at La Comer.
The application was released in July 2018 in Google play and App Store. A few months after publication in the stores, it already had more than 10,000 downloads in both stores combined.
At present, 16 percent of all purchase orders are made through the app, which means that the customers´s; response has been very positive and surely this percentage will grow over time.
Clearly, opening this new sales channel has benefited customers by providing an agile and convenient service, and also benefited La Comer, which has experienced a sharp sales increase. That is why in the near future they plan to create more applications that enhance the purchasing experience, to be implemented on the sales floor to help effectively and accurately in the assembly and delivery of customer orders.