Tailor-made and state-of-the-art digital products: the CencoSud case study

At CodersLab, our primary focus is on understanding and addressing the immediate software and digital platform needs of our clients. We are committed to devising, building, and iterating products and services that align perfectly with our clients’ expectations, ensuring intuitive and satisfying user experiences for both businesses and consumers

.For instance, in the retail sector, we have developed robust web-based e-commerce platforms and native apps, leveraging the scalability of Amazon Web Services (AWS). These solutions enable our clients to establish a strong cross-channel presence, effectively reaching a diverse customer base. Our expertise in building these platforms ensures that our clients can manage their operations seamlessly while expanding their market reach.

This is what we did with CencoSud, one of the largest multi-format retailers in Latin America. With approximately $12.9 billion in sales, a presence in 5 countries and a workforce of around 115,000 people, CencoSud is a key player in the LATAM market today.

Bringing Wong into modern times

Wong is one of the main retail brands owned by Cencosud in Peru. It was acquired in 2007 by Cencosud, investing USD 500 million. Cencosud, investing 500 million dollars. 

By today’s standards, the platform had serious UX and UI problems. In addition, the experience was not consistent across the different access points available.

At CodersLab, we developed their e-commerce using VTEX for the web, native apps and highly scalable services on AWS, supporting several different sales channels and customer types. In the end, we deploy a more scalable solution that supports higher load, is easier to modify and enhance.

This experience was validated by Martin Grosso, corporate CIO of Cencosud:

CodersLab helped us during the development of our e-commerce and apps. e-commerce and apps. We have found in CodersLab a partner to create high quality engineering teams, reduce costs and improve time to market our digital products.

How and why to rebuild CencoSud Metro from scratch

As well as working on Wong, our partnership with CencoSud also extended to another of their brands, Metro, with a presence in Colombia and Peru.

Our task was to rebuild two of the clients’ e-commerce brands from scratch, focusing heavily on improving the user experience and the use of new mobile and web technologies. New and essential functionalities required by both customers and the business were also added by both customers and the business.

Different delivery teams focused on different features of the new solution (mobile, VTEX, cloud, etc.). Mobile apps and web e-commerce were rebuilt using the latest generation version of VTEX, which also enabled a better mobile experience.

Applying the DevSecOps approach

Working with CencoSud not only led us to update and improve their e-commerce platforms. We also did intensive work internally, strengthening their security, operations and development system in a cross-cutting manner.

The main challenge was to orchestrate a data model for business intelligence for the deployment on AWS and migration from Oracle DB in incremental agile mode. This was the only way we could build a data infrastructure capable of supporting the organization’s daily processes without losing sight of security and trust.

We put our IT staffing services to the test to meet the target. We undertook a full team recruitment process that involved finding, assessing, interviewing and mentoring approximately 35 IT professionals from different areas. Among the most needed profiles, we found:

• IT Architect
• Ethical Hacker
• CISO, Technical Leaders
• Data Architects

At the core of our offerings are scalable solutions designed to support increasing traffic and facilitate seamless integration of improvements and modifications with each development cycle. Our approach is not just about handling the present needs but also about future-proofing our clients’ digital platforms. This ensures that as our clients grow, their digital infrastructure can scale and adapt without hindrance.

Working with CencoSud was and is one of the most interesting and complete experiences we have had, as we not only helped them develop modern and intuitive platforms for several of their brands. We also worked in depth on their data infrastructure, upgrading and enabling it to support multiple processes and a high flow of information.

Besides this, we also carry out an extensive IT staffing process to meet their staffing needs in the different projects of the franchise, always maintaining a quality standard to hire the technological talent available at the time.