Pharma & Healthcare
How Pague Menos is taking pharma ecommerce to a whole other level
The giant Brazilian drugstore chain used omnichannel to boost its digital presence and reach even more customers throughout the country.
Three-month
implementation
growth in digital operations revenue in two years
A three-digit
growtn
YOY in digital sales
An omnichannel experience as a way to meet consumers’ expectations and expand
Pague Menos’ digital transformation hasn’t started today, since it has its ecommerce operation up and running since 2011. It was in 2018 that it realized many changes needed to be made in order for the company to expand its operations and reach more customers.
In 2018, it chose VTEX as its partner to take its ecommerce channel to a whole different level, following the ecommerce trends in place and aiming to provide a greater service to its customers through an omnichannel operation and the new fulfillment methods that come with it. Plus, it also aimed to make management through the platform smoother and more flexible.
Pague Menos hasn’t stopped investing in perfecting its operation ever since and ended up migrating to VTEX IO in 2019, with an even bigger vision for the future.
“After migrating it was clear how the VTEX Commerce Platform was aggregating to our business. We started to have unbelievable growth in revenue. We had great expectations, but the result was much better than that, it allowed us to advance in our business and really put in place all the activations we were looking for”
Katriany Melo, Regional Digital Manager at Pague Menos
Colgate Pro: a one-of-a-kind B2B marketplace tailor-made for dentists
Colgate Pro’s story of achieving a 3-month implementation and 75% increase in dentists on the platform in one year.
go-live preparation
dentists database expansion in one year
conversion rate in customized products
Challenge
Colgate Brazil’s story with VTEX is one of innovation. For Colgate Pro, a marketplace was a must-have for the project, and Colgate made the most out of VTEX’s native marketplace functionality to build a B2B ecommerce website. Leveraging a pre-integrated system meant TCO and implementation time would be lower. Additionally, Colgate was looking for an SaaS platform that could be customized to meet their and their clients’ specific business functions. Although it is difficult to accommodate this level of complexity in the B2B digital commerce world, it is also fundamental.
Colgate has oral care consultants that work as B2B salespeople throughout Brazil. These consultants are responsible for visiting and talking to dentists about the newest products and their benefits. The company has decided that digital commerce was the most effective way to reach regions that consultants didn’t cover.
In order to transform this process digitally, Colgate needed to guarantee a few things:
- A special login system that could identify the registry number of certified dentists.
- A large product assortment, ranging from customized toothbrushes to heavy dentistry machinery.
- Integration of the fulfillment partner and distributor to the online sales platform.
Solution
With these needs in mind and also taking financial sustainability into account, Colgate leveraged native and out-of-the-box VTEX capabilities to build the platform. After scoping the project and hiring a partner agency, the entire developing process lasted 100 days—an impressively fast time to market, considering Colgate’s needs for customization, complex promotion models, and catalog migration.
The project was innovative for Colgate, as it is a one-of-a-kind marketplace catered for dentists. It was originally created, developed, and designed by Colgate-Palmolive’s ecommerce Brazil team and then rolled out to other countries around the globe, having Brazil’s results as a benchmark. In Brazil, the Colate Pro marketplace is the only one in the oral care industry.
The main differential advantage of the ecommerce architecture is a marketplace layer that integrates the distributor’s products to the website. By integrating the distributor’s own ecommerce catalog and inventory, Colgate Pro was able to scale its operation without additional logistic and fulfillment costs. Likewise, Colgate has been able to avoid channel conflict: the distributor views the marketplace as a new online sales channel, instead of a threat.
Beyond the marketplace, Colgate invested in two strategic solutions to improve sales: a cashback promotional module and a loyalty program module. Both are native VTEX functionalities and have been implemented alongside b8one, a VTEX partner agency.
The loyalty program is valid for all dentists, with different tiers and perks. Loyalty points can be traded for discounts on specific products. As for the cashback initiative, it is going to be used as a promotional strategy. The most recent example was a joint venture with Phillips, with the goal of selling more electric toothbrushes.
Results
“We are putting considerable effort into technology to deliver the best oral care marketplace for dentists, and we believe that the continued focus on product customization adds a lot of value to our dentist customers. The amazing part of this project is also the availability. Now, dentists can order any product they want, at any time. We have a broader range of delivery and covered areas, and dentists are making more orders, more frequently.”
Danilo Turbiani, Ecommerce Director at Colgate-Palmolive Brazil
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