Chedraui, the largest Mexican retailer recently launched a new version of SAP Hybris  e-commerce site with a wide variety of products, ranging from pharmaceutical items, electronics, and their own private label product line.

We were tasked with reimagining their e-commerce experience on their mobile app using SAP Hybris. Some of the immediate problems the Advanced Mankind product design team undertook were to structure an effective checkout flow and design onboarding for new users that would be unobtrusive to their experience. Our team focus on these changes originated on customer observations and the low completion rates they experienced during their sessions.

Our product development team did extensive user research to provide the app  with up-to-date UX/UI best practices. It was important to us to fully empathize with both our client and their customers. Because of this, we had to be careful to not push the design too far off from their current shopping experience, learning where their customers shop and what kind of online experience they are familiar with; set the boundaries for what we would update and what we should leave to update at a later time. Some of our goals were to strengthen their brand presence with a strong design system and to deliver an MVP product to reduce development time and encourage an agile framework between teams.

From a development perspective, the new app had major upgrades in the  tech stack and software architecture changes to improve the security, performance, and device resource management. Our team moved the legacy app from an old java application to Flutter, an OS-agnostic framework from Google that provides a platform  for rapid mobile application development.

Our development team implemented an orchestrator of services that handles both the traffic and the security of the internal services and the third-party services connected with the product.

Last, we revamped the backend services to a micro-services architecture, in order to break down complex logic, reduce latency, maximize the use of caching on the cloud, and have a better organization of the infrastructure. The results are advantageous scalability in critical times such as Black Friday (handling over 3,000 users per minute), a reduction in infrastructure costs, and separate backend infrastructure to provide OTA (over the air) updates to the app and reduce app releases to the app stores, giving flexibility to the IT team to deploy changes to their services as needed without having to re-bundle the app and go through the approval process in critical sales time.

The Chedraui Mobile app, makes the first enterprise eCommerce app in Latin America built with Flutter, helping us position Chedraui as a tech leader and pioneer in digital innovation.

Currently, the client’s new app is helping Chedraui handle 80% (and growing) of all online sales.. With our customer-centered approach to product design and app development, Chedraui is able to offer world class customer experience before the COVID-19 pandemic crisis arose worldwide enabling them to sustain their market share. Our strategic tech advisory team remains in close collaboration with key areas of the client to keep adding new and useful features that sustain their leadership in the national market. Other close competitors have noticeably taken much longer to offer a similar level of service through their respective digital services.