The small shops in Colombia, traditional style business, are the main source of income for millions of families and for about a hundred years never needed to be changed. But since the lockdowns imposed during the pandemic force this owners to close their stores, we came up with a solution to help them.

We digitized every store, in every corner, in every block, in every neighborhood, and connected the stores and consumers all in www.tiendacerca.com to create the most powerful online store. Customers just had to share their location and with a single click, place their orders through WhatsApp

In March 2020 daily life radically changed. Activities that could lead to crowds were limited and a restrictive quarantine that forced Colombians to stay at home was implemented indefinitely. Traditional channel in Colombia weighs about 80% of the total volume of Bavaria and the neighborhood stores make about 50% of that volume. These small businesses were one of the affected segments; in the first month of the pandemic more than 18% of the traditional channel establishments closed and an additional 5% thought of closing their businesses. Given the relevance of this channel, it was extremely important for Bavaria to work on a solution that could help stores.

Digitalize every store in Colombia to prevent their close.

Connect the stores with new costumers to increase their sales.

Make these stores competitively relevant to other e-commerce in the country.

Keep people safe staying at home while shopping in the pandemic crisis.

Local stores have always been there for consumers but in terms of transformation, they seem to be frozen on time while the rest of the world has been facing a huge digital transformation. In order to attract new consumers and remain relevant, they need to evolve and create new ways to connect.

As a result, we digitized every store, in every corner, in every block, in every neighborhood, and connected the stores and consumers all in www.tiendacerca.com to create the most powerful online store. Customers just had to share their location and with a single click, place their orders through WhatsApp to their local grocer for daily provisions.

March 26: First contact – Whatsapp direct contact with the tenderos.

March 29: Wrong data reporting. Consumers reported potential gaps in the tenderos data.

April 3: Sub Channel Icons. With a graphic intervention we begin to differentiate each type of subchannel.

April 3: Customer Content. We generate content with new laws about de isolation and with protection protocols for the tenderos.

April 3 self – managed registration. We improved the way tenderos could register.

April 13: Rate my POC. We gave consumers the possibility to rate their shop in order to see new opportunities for improvement.

April 20: Automatic digital Flyer. Within the platform we had a functionality where the tendero could create a communication with some información to share it by whatsapp.

May 4: Marketplace go live

May 11: Bycicles donation. For those shops that did not have delivery resources, we donated bycicles to help them.

May 11: Verticals filter

May 19: E-commerce CTA

Tiendacerca is a 1:1 Hyper local economy base platform that quality of neighberhoods across Colombia by solidifying the historical relationcsips between tenderos and their clientes. It was building as a PWA (Progressive web application), an application software delivered through the web in order to work on any platform, desktop ando mobile devices.

Tienda cerca is a custom e-commerce platform building with Laravel 7 as a Backend, React js as a Frontend and relational databases Mysql. Hosted on Amazon Web Services with EC2 instances using diferent services like s3 buckets, Lambda, RDS instances, cloudfront CDN and load balancers. Our platform is connected with differents tools in order to monitorize the user's behavior and platform's as well, tools like Google Analytics, hotjar and Onetrust.

Tiendacerca PWA is the 2.0 version of our platform, is currently live in 5 countries (Colombia, Peru, Salvador, Paraguay y Ecuador

Long term outcomes

Tienda Cerca, pasó a ser un Marketplace en donde le facilitamos la vida del tendero ya que no tiene que tomar la orden sino ya hay un e-commerce incorporado en la plataforma.

Hay descuentos y un ecosistema comercial que hace la oferta más interesante

Democratizamos cada vez más el acceso a e-commerce a los tenderos ya que les damos el conocimiento, capacitación y les pone la plataforma.

Scalability

Actualmente la plataforma cuenta con presencia en mas de 6 países y se ha replicado su funcionamiento en cada uno de ellos, por lo que esperamos que sea una idea adaptada a varios mercados.

Investment recieved

Por parte de ABI, 2M de dólares, por parte de otras compañías 600k dólares.