Scaling Online Business: Intercompras Uses X-Cart to Quickly Grow International Operations
Opened in 2004 intercompras.com
How it all began
Intercompras, a leading IT & tech online store, is a reference for the electronics industry in Mexico.
Founded in 2004 by Eduardo Noriega Tovar in Hermosillo, Sonora (Mexico), Intercompras evolved over time and now distributes technology products and services such as electronics, computers, appliances, cell phones, and gaming throughout Mexico.
Intercompras’ ability to nationally deliver its products to homes, offices, schools, and all types of businesses comes from a model that consists of agreements and partnerships made with hundreds of warehouses and companies within the Mexican Republic; which is what we will cover here.
Time to Expand – eCommerce website “Tienda Ghía”: Tienda en Línea Ghía
Ghía is one of those close partnership relationships mentioned earlier.
Intercompras distributes around six hundred technology brands and one of them is Tienda Ghía.
Their website, tienda.guia.com.mx, was developed and is maintained by Intercompras.
While Intercompras has developed their own website in-house many years ago, they have learned from experience the amount of resources—both financial and human—that it takes to keep any website properly operating.
When contacted by Tienda Ghía to help them upgrade their eCommerce platform in 2017, they saw this opportunity to implement all that they had painstakingly learned with their own platform to support their partner:
They asked us to support them with their online store project: From finding the best platform, developing their content, creating and curating the catalog to everything else that has to do with the actual operation of an online store.
What were their needs?
- A modern and nimble eCommerce platform
- Easy to deploy and maintain
- A great variety of templates and addons to support their marketing requirements
- Secure and reliable payment integrations
- Reasonable price
How did they start?
Like most businesses do: Reaching out to Shopify.
Originally, based on their internal experience as developers, they decided replatforming would be the best decision: Building an eCommerce website from scratch seems to be an enormous undertaking, one that Tienda Ghía—or Intercompras—wouldn’t be able to handle with the resources they had available.
As conversations progressed, however, they realized Shopify’s basic solution wouldn’t cover the minimum functionalities needed to deliver a proper experience for their customers or the ability to manage day-to-day activities as they had originally envisioned.
At some point, they were even playing with an idea to upgrade to Shopify Plus. As appealing as Shopify Plus looks at a first glance, though, not only was this a very expensive solution, simple daily tasks—such as marketing promotions, coupons, banners, discounts, and so on—would also be extremely complicated and time-consuming.
That’s when they first heard about X-Cart.
A new partner: X-Cart
After being introduced at an industry trade show and meeting with X-Cart’s team of solution service experts, building Tienda Ghía from scratch not only seemed like the perfect solution but also one which would satisfy the needs of the most demanding team: IT and its developers.
In fact, one lesson Carlos learned and shared with us was that he and his marketing team not only could have been more involved in the design phase, but should have been more involved!
X-Cart exceeded all their requirements:
- Being present, available, responsive, and fulfilling all deadlines within each sprint
- Proposing designs and customizations that would enable their team to manage their website’s day-to-day needs on their own
- Exceeded their development goals and expectations, giving them insights to implement in their own in-house shopping cart platform, but also to apply in future projects.
As a matter of fact, Intercompras was so pleased with the final result that they decided to undertake a second project with X-Cart.
Learn how to upgrade to X-Cart here.
Learning from Experience: Their Cisco Store
Some of the lessons learned from their first engagement were the value of having the marketing team be a close part of the decision-making process from the get-go. Applying their recommendations in aspects such as look and feel, branding, categories and categorizations, and catalogs would have facilitated the entire shopping cart implementation process and improved conversion rates.
In the works: ComprasMX
Not too many companies have the opportunity to diversify their businesses to another organization. Intercompras got to do it all over again!
With each engagement, X-Cart opened new doors and enabled opportunities to be tried in other online stores.
Still in the making, ComprasMX has the best of both previous experiences: Both IT and Marketing teams were deeply involved from the beginning, making sure their technical and creative needs were met:
Well, as I anticipated, it has everything we want and even more.
With limited resources, their team was able to focus on what makes their business unique: Customer care. He continued:
X-Cart has helped us a lot: We can focus and work on the content we have and provide a better shopping experience to our clients.
What lies ahead?
When asked about the possibility of replatforming their own successful website to X-Cart, Carlos laughs and says:
Who knows? Maybe that can be our 4th and biggest project with X-Cart to date. It pays off trusting X-Cart. It is a platform that will help you achieve what you need.
Scaling your business is never easy, particularly during years in which the economic consequences of the global pandemic are still very much around.
Nonetheless, there is hope in numbers:
Although our store is doing very well and has had very good sales, the pandemic accelerated some things while slowing down others. We had hoped for better numbers but are sure we will reach them.
In fact, online sales have substantially grown in these past couple of years and data suggests that this is a trend to stay. Intercompras, Tienda Ghía, Cisco and ComprasMX will rely on X-Cart’s solutions and team of experts to support them along the way towards a path that, undoubtedly, will continue to be successful.
If you want to learn more about deploying or replatforming to a nimble, versatile, and cost-effective platform, reach out to our team of experts and let us help you choose and create the best solution for you and your business.
Carolina is the Senior Marketing Manager at X-Cart. Results and data-driven, she has spent her career navigating through multiple disciplines within Marketing, and lately focusing on her passion: Content and Organic growth. She is fluent in 3 languages, with 14 years of experience leading B2B marketing strategies domestic & internationally. In her tenure, she has had the opportunity to navigate in multiple industries: Technology, Telecommunications, Construction, eCommerce and SaaS. An avid traveler, she's now halfway through visiting all of US' 50 States.
