With more than 416 stores operating in 11 states in Brazil, Extrafarma is among the six largest pharmacy chains in Brazil, being the leader in its segment in the states of Pará, Maranhão, and Amapá.
The chain started its activities in 1960 in the state of Pará and, since then, has been conquering space in the consumer's preference with entrepreneurial initiatives that add value to the brand.
The scenario
With the delicate scenario we are living due to the pandemic and social isolation, it was necessary to accelerate the plans to start the brand's e-commerce, since sales were made exclusively in physical stores.
The expansion plan had already been studied in recent years since the health, hygiene, and beauty segment has been gaining space among consumers since 2018. According to the 39th webshoppers report, by Nielsen, the category grew 112% between 2017 and 2018 becoming one of the main categories in Brazilian e-commerce.
The project
The brand sought our assistance to develop its first online sales channel, an e-commerce that kept the essence of the brand, focused on user experience and an efficient post-sale.
The project was developed in VTEX IO for providing better business management and efficient after sales functionalities. In addition, the platform has greater freedom in creating custom functionalities that can be created in the future for channel integration.
The development
The biggest challenge in this project was the timeframe, our team needed to structure the project in two levels for the brand's e-commerce to be up and running in 1 month after the project development started.
For the first level we chose to create a simple and efficient design, based on a VTEX template, after the choice we did the customization together with the client in order to maintain the essence of the brand.
We worked on the development and implementation of customized functionalities for the project such as search returns, more functional filters, we also adapted the institutional pages to create the page "our stores" where all the physical units of the brand appear for the beginning of the channel integration.
For this project, it was also necessary to create a simple application for integration with an important partner of the brand, to maintain the SAC and standard forms on the network.
Result
The finalized project was an MVP with the installation of the VTEX grocery template, made the necessary branding adaptations. We customized the site with some interesting functionalities for the user experience, and achieved the goal of delivering a site in a short period of time and ready to start Extrafarma's online sales operation.
The VTEX IO project is still going through the evolution process, but in this first phase we can already see great results in performance. The speed of the site on desktops is about 2 seconds, an excellent score, while on mobile devices the loading time is 5 seconds.
Extrafarma's new site in its first month of online operation already has traffic of more than 10 thousand organic hits, which proves the great SEO scores.
You can check the results at https://www.extrafarma.com.br/
