Reorganizing the e-commerce business in the Group
Intercorp Retail, following the step set by Intercorp Perú, is one of the first movers in the digital transformation process of companies in Peru. In line with this, replicating the physical retail experience in an e-commerce channel was an imminent step to follow. In the past, the online sales channels of InRetail's three main brands, Supermercados Peruanos (supermarkets), Oechsle (department stores) and Promart (home center), operated independently and with diverse infrastructures.
In order to centralize the infrastructure that supported these three e-commerce and automate processes with a cloud approach, around twelve months ago, the management of InRetail decided to develop an ecosystem made up of ten squads in total, among which the marketplace team. “At present, the marketplace plays a very important role when talking about e-commerce strategies. In the past, all backoffice processes that support sales through the e-commerce platform were managed in a decentralized manner for the three brands,” says Luis Alberto Urrelo, Deputy Manager of Digital Architecture at InRetail.
With the inclusion of the marketplace, work began with a focus on bringing new sellers outside of those contemplated in the scope of the products or SKUs that were previously included in the three e-commerce mentioned. Thus, a set of external sellers began to be created that could be in the same marketplaces of these three e-commerce platforms.
The right platform to support the new marketplaces
Stability and operational efficiency are characteristics that the InRetail team requires. In that sense, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was used, a platform that has technically facilitated all marketplaces to be a window for the sale of these new sellers, not necessarily related to the group. In this way, InRetail works on automation processes for the development of cloud solutions, where Xertica, leveraged on GCP technology, is a great ally in this type of projects.
Marketplaces have a centralized platform from which backoffice processes are managed. This platform is hosted on GCP. In this regard, Luis Alberto Urrelo emphasizes: “All the backoffice that can process the payment split, the checkout, the shopping cart that allows you to combine products from Promart, Oeschle, Peruvian Supermarkets (Plaza Vea and Vivanda) and other sellers, the processes combined with split payments where divisions are made for each of these payments so that they reach each of the companies respectively (external sellers included), all are processes that have been automated and that are currently supported by the GCP infrastructure ”. Urrelo adds: “So, for us, services of this type are key and should always be available. For this reason, we trust that these services can easily be within the GCP platform, so that all the data can be processed there and stored.”
In addition to this, InRetail marketplaces have a customer care service that serves the customer at 360º and works with some solutions such as tracking incidents, exchanges and returns, and a series of business processes that support the checkout process and to the product purchasing process. “We work with Agora and Financiera Oh! as means of payment and both support all their services through GCP,” says Urrelo. To the three brands mentioned, Real Plaza Go was added as a tenant rental business. However, with the situation marked by COVID-19, Real Plaza Go became a marketplace where tenants serve as sellers.
All those squads that today belong to the ecosystem and that are developing cloud-native solutions with a distributed approach are satisfied with the availability of services on the GCP platform. “We have the peace of mind of knowing that we do not need to invest time in any type of technical activity that represents “putting out fires,” highlights Urrelo. And he adds: “At the service level, we have turned to Xertica mainly for consulting or onboarding purposes, rather than for support issues, which speaks highly of the platform. “We don’t have any problems with operational stability.”
What's coming: more e-commerce initiatives based on GCP
InRetail maintains a practice of continuous improvement of its processes and relies on technology for this purpose. In this sense, the company is working to improve its transaction processes with the purpose of evolving the customer's purchasing and post-sales experience, with a purchasing capacity enhanced by the history of each user. “So that technological diversity and/or decentralization of automation processes in software development are not generated, relying on GCP plays a key role,” concludes Urrelo.
Each of the initiatives that are incorporated into the InRetail ecosystem, being digital and cloud native, always seek to work with PaaS, thus seeking that the first reference when it comes to automating the operation of digital services or solving any problem is GCP.
