MUNICH (Germany) / DURHAM (USA), April 16, 2018 – commercetools, the leader in next-generation commerce software, has been selected by Sodimac – the home improvement subsidiary of Falabella – which operates over 246 stores in 7 countries across South America – to be its commerce platform provider for its aggressive online growth strategy. This agreement will enable Sodimac to innovate beyond traditional commerce channels by leveraging microservices and the API-based architecture of the commercetools platform.
Consumers are browsing, engaging and shopping 24/7 on mobile devices and social channels, and soon on a variety of IoT machines in what commercetools dubbed the post-web era. Identifying this trend early, Sodimac transitioned its online presence from a reference site to a transactional site in 2016 and began to aggressively market to both its consumer and construction trade buyers. Though this more than doubled its online sales from the previous year, adapting to buyer behaviors was slow and costly. They needed to be nimbler. As a result, Sodimac elected to transition from the Oracle ATG commerce platform to the commercetools API-based commerce solution to support and enhance its position as the leading provider of construction materials and home improvement products in Latin America and to allow them to innovate beyond traditional commerce.
Innovation has been a core value of Sodimac since its founding in 1952. In 2003, Sodimac merged with Falabella – one of Latin America’s largest retail conglomerates and listed in the Forbes 100 of The World’s Most Innovative Companies. To stay ahead of the curve on customer shopping behavior, as well as potential threats from Latin American and overseas competitors such as Amazon, Falabella has adopted a culture of innovation backed by technology. In 2012, Sodimac opened its innovation center in Chile to systematize innovation with its suppliers.
commercetools offers the only enterprise-class, cloud-native commerce platform built exclusively using APIs. This approach will greatly accelerate Sodimac’s time-to-market for introducing new features, bringing new channels on board and building new business processes. commercetools offers a library of 300 APIs backed by microservices, which serve as the basis of a catalog that will be used across multiple brands providing unprecedented flexibility and scalability across their entire IT organization. With its extensive API library, the platform can easily connect to back-office systems such as OMS, ERP and CRM solutions, or externally to partners and marketplaces. Despite the large amounts of data coming into these systems, the modern architecture of the commercetools platform will enable lightning-fast transactions without performance degradation.
Falabella’s Sodimac represents the type of innovative retailer that will survive and thrive as retailing continues to move beyond the web and into a variety of new digital channels. We are thrilled to help this forward-thinking company build a commerce journey that maps to both the current and future requirements for serving its customers and maintaining its phenomenal brand loyalty and retail leadership.
President, commercetools, Inc
More information at www.sodimac.cl.