Grupo Monge: online sales doubled within a year

Challenge

Grupo Monge (HQ in Costa Rica) is one of the largest multinational online and offline companies in Central America (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua El Salvador and Peru), providing motorcycles, electronics and home appliances, as well as selling furniture online. The company has its own credit system of payments in weekly installments. It is represented by more than 500 stores all over those countries with over 6000 employees.

Moving online was a challenge itself for the company. “We thought that people were rather conservative and not ready to shop online, - says Marcela Ledezma, E-Commerce Manager at Grupo Monge. But eventually, we took that risk and started the project.”

The company had also faced some technical and operational challenges: Grupo Monge had no previous eCommerce experience and all processes and ERP had to be redone to integrate online sales; it was also challenging to set up the company’s credit system online as many certificates should have been prepared to give people this opportunity to pay online in parts.

Solution

Having partnered with Tecnofin, we have done a lot of customization together. Grupo Monge IT team was working on changes in the ERP and the credit system, and Tecnofin on the web store.

The first store TiendaMonge.com was developed using the nopCommerce version 3.60. The following was done:

• Setup of the Grupo Monge credit services:
  • Application for a credit letting customers upload their official documents
  • Display of a customer’s credit balance
  • Display of different payment options (number of installments and the amounts) during the order process
  • Storing, updating and later validating customers data and their passwords using a third party on-line service (Safeway)
• Payments with PayPal and credit cards through a local bank
• Pick-up functionality: customers can select a store; the order availability date is calculated and displayed
• Integration of the web store with SAP ERP and the Monge Credit System
• Automatic licensing for MS software

All this required over 20 integration with 8 entities: SAP ERP (products, prices, stock, exchange rate, location of stores for orders pick-up, etc.), the credit system (application for credit line, uploading of scanning documents, confirmation of credit line, checking and displaying credit line balance, checking and displaying different payment options for paying an order, payment authorization, etc.), company’s messaging system (for sending messages to customers by mail/SMS/WhatsApp), and external entities: PayPal, Credomatic (Credit Card processor in Central America), Safeway (security entity for creating, updating, checking and validating customers and their passwords), Geotrack (address validation and normalization from geo-references given by the customer), and Microsoft Distributor (for Office licensing).

Later, a multi-store with 8 product catalogs (no shopping) for different brands and subsidiaries in various countries were also created.

A mobile responsive site version was developed as well.

Result

TiendaMonge.com site had a smooth start. A Cyber Monday 10 days later brought around 20,000 visitors to the site (250 concurrent visitors at peak times) and spectacular sales.

Within the next year, online sales grew more than 100%.

“We were happy to see the results and how the things are going with the online store. We have been growing together with people from Tecnofin and have learned a lot of things since we went online: credit system works very well online, people are not afraid to buy online including big things, an average bill in the online store is higher than in a traditional one,” - told Marcela Ledezma.

The online store helped Grupo Monge to cover another group of the shoppers, mostly millennials that have higher incomes, look for good brands and spend more online. These people were buying on Amazon, eBay, but once they got to know about Grupo Monge, many came to TiendaMonge.com.

During the past year, the shop got more popularity, higher ranking in Google search, and more organic traffic.

Tecnofin (est. 1993) is the leading company in Mexico in services for e-commerce and e-banking. The company has developed hundreds of e-commerce sites to meet specific needs of each customer in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Tecnofin also provides consulting and training services in e-commerce.