falabella.com: Maximizing its ecommerce platform supported by Google Cloud
About falabella.com
falabella.com, created in 2021, is the ecommerce platform of Grupo Falabella. It sells a wide range of products made by large, medium, and small companies in Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usThe company leverages cloud technologies to process and collect information from the platform aimed at improving user experience and sales strategies.
Google Cloud results
- Increased report generation from 5 to 25 per sprint
- 300% growth in Google Cloud tool users
- More data collection and visualization capacity
Provides tools to sellers for business optimization
Established in 2021, falabella.com is an ecommerce platform running in Chile and Peru and launching soon in Colombia. This marketplace, owned by Grupo Falabella, sells in a single place a full range of products by Falabella, Sodimac, Tottus, and Linio, as well as by top-quality entrepreneurial organizations and SMBs.
In 2019, Grupo Falabella decided to consolidate its data ecosystem on Google Cloud. And in January 2021, it began creating a data lake for the platform.
The company supported this initiative by implementing advanced analytics, data engineering, and data science capabilities for falabella.com’s Marketplace.
In search of a better proposition
Given the context of constant growth and highly competitive ecommerce platforms in Latin America, falabella.com intended to drive a new value proposition. Supported by advanced digital capabilities, the company sought to make its platform available to all Grupo Falabella’s businesses and also to thousands of other companies and SMBs interested in selling through its website.
The challenge was to accommodate multiple sellers with varying needs and to provide them with business visibility, which would be addressed by a platform that could sell their products backed by data containing the information required to drive a successful business strategy.
This scenario led the company to search for new solutions. The organization was on the lookout for a tool not only compatible with existing technologies and platforms, but also able to meet the company’s main goal: transforming data into insights for seller.
Solutions that make data visible
Although falabella.com already relied on a data visualization tool, it needed an innovative solution that met its requirements and ensured proper integration and execution for the team. Other key factors were also taken into account: launching this tool as soon as possible, offering an intuitive and secure interface for sellers, and enabling fast scaling should the number of users grow significantly in the short term.
After assessing several value propositions from public cloud services, the company opted for Google Cloud, with Looker as its preferred solution based on its goals.
Looker was chosen for a variety of reasons. First, this solution offers a semantic layer with versioning capabilities, which simplifies analytics. Second, in terms of architecture, development, and maintenance, it seamlessly integrates with GitLab, which facilitates model version management, development experience, and collaboration. Last, but not least, it comes with its own engine to store anything users can view.
BigQuery was another star Google Cloud solution chosen by the company. It is used for storing databases for analysis, which then connect to Looker for web platform integration. The company also rolled out Google Kubernetes Engine to deploy, manage, and scale website applications, and Cloud Storage to store unstructured data.
Thanks to Cloud Run, developers can now focus on writing code and spend less time operating, setting up, and scaling the service. They also rely on Pub/Sub to send and receive messages within the platform.
The journey to Google Cloud furnished falabella.com with all the necessary solutions to compete in a market full of challenges and with a great growth potential in the short, medium, and long term.
"The cloud is a tool that accelerates value creation. By providing our team members with these technologies and their benefits, we can reduce their workload and repetitive tasks, which helps them focus on designing efficient products. Google Cloud certainly makes teamwork easier and improves performance."
—Karim Touma, Regional Director of Data & Analytics, falabella.comNew processes that lead to new results
As Looker had to be deployed fast, falabella.com employees self-trained using videos and educational materials. Once the formal service agreements had been executed, an expert team began to provide support on the tool: work meetings and two demo workshops were held to let workers dive into this solution.
Looker has turned out to be a truly innovative tool for falabella.com employees. Although processes became more complex, the learning curve drove new capacities and overturned the paradigm of report generation, setting the foundation for a differential value proposition for sellers. Consequently, the number of new reports per sprint rose from 5 to 25.
Immersed within a new reporting culture, where the number of data-consuming users grew from 0 to 7,000 in only a year, the company built a robust ecosystem that helped enhance product launches. Apart from enabling the optimization of platform operations, Google Cloud solutions contributed to report analytics, understanding users better, and defining new business strategies.
"After implementing the tool, word spread and we were frequently asked about our deployment and development process. We quickly started sharing all our expertise with teams both inside and outside falabella.com, such as the cases of CMR Puntos, for developing dashboards with its partners, and Home Delivery, for its indicator visualization project for carriers. In a way, we became Looker 'evangelists'."
—Teresita Alessandri, Seller Intelligence Manager, falabella.comThe future of ecommerce lies in the cloud
Today, falabella.com operates its Data Monetization Platform (DMP) in two countries: Chile, with 1,700 users (sellers) per month in the DMP, and Peru, with 300. The company is planning to launch the website in Colombia in 2023.
In just one year, this platform went from having 80 active visitors in data-generating Google Cloud tools to almost 250.
The company is now working on deploying a data monetization instance for internal users. In the short term, it intends to make Looker available to all teams and to develop a dedicated reporting portal, targeted at democratizing report generation and website user experience.
"We’ve come a long way in democratizing the use of cloud technologies to make them more readily accessible. By relying on highly intuitive tools, Google Cloud makes it easy to bring technology closer to people. Today, our strategy is to provide users with data and to create a culture of skills transformation."
—Karim Touma, Regional Director of Data & Analytics, falabella.comTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About falabella.com
falabella.com, created in 2021, is the ecommerce platform of Grupo Falabella. It sells a wide range of products made by large, medium, and small companies in Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico.