Grupo Casas Bahia adopts AI solutions for retail and expands its marketplace
About Grupo Casas Bahia
Grupo Casas Bahia is an omnichannel platform providing various consumer-facing retail solutions, from products to financial and logistics services. With countrywide operations, the company has already served over 100 million Brazilians under different brands.
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Contact usThe company has strengthened its e-commerce structure thanks to Google Cloud and improved its product search experience with Retail Search and Recommendations AI.
Google Cloud results
- SKU daily updates grew from 100K to +7M
- User conversion from search increased by 58%
- Click-through rate (CTR) rose 28%
- Bounce rate dropped by 4%
- Total catalog loading time reduced from 24 to 4 hours
28% higher income per app user
Founded over 70 years ago, Grupo Casas Bahia is a retail conglomerate with a significant presence all over Brazil. With stores in 562 municipalities serving over 100 million Brazilians, the company operates with a variety of brands covering three verticals: retail, under Casas Bahia, Extra.com.br, Ponto (formerly Ponto Frio), and Bartira; financial services, under banQi and Rede Celer; and logistics, under ASAPLog.
Grupo Casas Bahia relies on an ecosystem of nearly 36,000 employees and over 20,000 online sellers, including a marketplace connecting more than 151,000 sellers that leverage the organization's platform structure and logistics network to boost their own sales.
Thanks to its strategic market positioning, the company has become one of Brazil's leading omnichannel platforms. Casas Bahia and Ponto have even been recognized as Top of Mind brands in several editions of an annual survey conducted by Datafolha research institute, which rates the most remembered brands.
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Innovation has always been one of the company's top priorities. And this is evident in the technology chosen by the organization, which already relied on cloud infrastructure to meet demand and enrich customer experience.
With Firebase, the company controls the entire lifecycle of its mobile applications, closely monitoring app quality as infrastructure grows.
Google Analytics helps Grupo Casas Bahia's business teams tag and measure insights from users' journeys, which are then used to customize CRM campaigns and enhance management reports.
However, the company's decision to expand its marketplace highlighted the need to pursue new cloud solutions supporting the e-commerce platform.
"When Grupo Casas Bahia decided to expand the participation of marketplace sellers in our product portfolio, our search and recommendation challenges evolved: thousands of items now became millions. Google Cloud then came into play in this new scenario."
—Diego Caxito, Head of IT, Grupo Casas BahiaA new marketplace strategy brings new challenges
As new marketplace workloads were much higher than had ever been supported before, the search and recommendations solutions used previously were no longer adequate, as they generated low resilience, poor search result quality, long product loading times, and a drop in customer conversion.
After a thorough analysis, Grupo Casas Bahia's IT team embarked on market research and drafted a range of technical criteria, including catalog update times, use of model retraining, and search relevance.
"Our previous solution was no longer useful in terms of data accuracy and item updates due to the large volume of products in our marketplace. We assessed several market players and came across Retail API, a managed service offered by Google Cloud."
—Diego Caxito, Head of IT, Grupo Casas Bahia"Our own team was made available for the PoC of the new solution, which was also tested along with Grupo Casas Bahia's e-commerce segment and US-based Google Cloud’s product team to adjust certain parameters," says Caxito. After only 45 days, results were compared and Google Cloud's Retail API was chosen for the company's three e-commerce brands.
Retail Search, a service included under Retail API, was adopted for Casas Bahia; it automatically chooses the most revenue-maximizing sort order by learning from user trends. Recommendations AI, a feature to request product recommendations for a specific user and user event, was applied to Ponto and Extra.com.br. Both services are based on artificial intelligence to optimize searches and recommendations.
Retail API: The scalability that Grupo Casas Bahia needed
Implementing Retail API not only made the e-commerce platform structure more robust, but also enhanced catalog configuration to improve the quality of results and searches, even with ever-changing online retail data. "Black Friday meant a significant performance test for the product, and we obtained excellent results," says Caxito.
Grupo Casas Bahia managed to better support more third-party sellers in its marketplace. The number of managed SKUs had already soared, and the new solutions helped the company deal with a new scale: from 100,000 to over 7 million daily updates.
The team also managed to reduce the total catalog loading time from 24 to just four hours. Previously, it took eight hours to insert data into the catalog; now, this is done in real time thanks to Retail Search's internal search features.
After this transformation, the company's applications also led to positive results, including 58% higher user conversion rates driven by searches, 28% increase in CTR, and 4% lower bounce rate. Thanks to these encouraging figures, Grupo Casas Bahia's income grew 28% per app user.
AI redefines online retail customer experience
Artificial intelligence has been key to achieving these results. Deploying Recommendations AI has accelerated product recommendations in the e-commerce platform, especially in category-based searches.
"After adopting Google Cloud's AI, feedback and training features, searches are now closer to what customers expect."
—Diego Caxito, Head of IT, Grupo Casas BahiaToday Grupo Casas Bahia is focusing on bringing additional innovations to its marketplace's search experience, which was impossible with the previous solutions. In the short term, the company will continue adjusting retraining models, and later, it is planning to move its data lake to Google Cloud. With all these actions, the company will have more time to invest in its true mission: putting customers at the center of the entire experience.
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About Grupo Casas Bahia
Grupo Casas Bahia is an omnichannel platform providing various consumer-facing retail solutions, from products to financial and logistics services. With countrywide operations, the company has already served over 100 million Brazilians under different brands.