Grupo Éxito: this is how we enhanced Éxito and Carulla apps

About the client

Grupo Éxito is a multinational retail company headquartered in Colombia. It is one of Latin America's leading supermarket and retail chains, including Éxtio and Carulla.
Today, Grupo Éxito operates a variety of store formats, including hypermarkets, supermarkets, convenience stores, and a complex digital ecosystem that includes apps, sales portals, and loyalty programs. Grupo Éxito also has a presence in other countries in the region, such as Uruguay (Grupo Disco and Grupo Devoto) and Argentina (Libertad and Paseo).

Only in Colombia, Grupo Éxito has 522 stores and more than 34,700 employees.

In 2023, the sales of Grupo Éxito's digital stores grew 52.3%, reaching 14 million orders.

The first retail company in Colombia to be listed on the New York, Brazil, and Colombia stock exchanges. NYSE: EXTO

Grupo Éxito sought to improve its users' digital shopping experience, increase sales, and strengthen its omnichannel strategy. For this task, it was necessary to build a comprehensive solution that would give its customers a homogeneous experience, with no distinction between physical stores, websites, or apps.

For this project, it was necessary to build apps that could match other global benchmarks in the retail sector. Such apps had to provide a digital commerce channel for Éxito and Carulla supermarkets, taking advantage of mobile devices' portability and potential to breach the barriers between the physical and digital experience by incorporating services to enhance the quality of the face-to-face experience.

All of these digital assets had to be capable of delivering frictionless payment experiences and, ultimately, needed to be based on operational excellence and the continuous delivery of value through the periodic implementation of new functionality.

Bug detection and continuous improvement through increasingly frequent value deliveries greatly impacted user experience. The apps' average ratings significantly improved. In just two months, the Éxito app on the Android operating system went from an average rating of 3.9 to 4.7, and the Carulla app went from 4.1 to 4.4.

We also developed shopping experiences in segments such as meat and textiles and created observability dashboards that allow us to monitor application behavior to optimize their performance.

Thanks to the increase in app sales, we managed to make apps the most important digital channel for Grupo Éxito, above its web portal, and with the lowest uninstall rate in the market. Since 2022, sales through Grupo Éxito's apps have grown by three percentage digits compared to the immediately preceding year.

"Apps are a success story at Pragma and at Grupo Éxito."
Juliana Giraldo
Agile IT Leader at Grupo Éxito

By understanding the business objectives of Grupo Éxito, it became clear that to obtain excellent results, it would be crucial that we build synergy with the talent of other suppliers who also participated in the project. For this reason, we led from Pragma:

• Peer support groups: In these spaces, we invited all the talent involved in the project to do live tutorials, unify our vision on best practices, and strengthen technical issues and soft skills. In the beginning, these spaces were weekly, then biweekly. In the end, they became monthly when the team was fully cohesive.

• Agile clinics: These meetings operated as workshops in which, with the support of a Pragma Agile Coach, all those involved in the project became familiar with aspects of agile methodologies that improved communication between teams and reduced delivery times. The adoption and monitoring of OKR (Objective Key Results) to measure project progress was also encouraged.

• Standardization spaces: In these meetings, we worked to unify the user experience in each of the app versions we were developing while preventing and correcting errors thanks to shared knowledge.

Among the functionalities we delivered between 2023 and early 2024 are:

• Last Minute Craving: customers can add one more unit to the shopping cart, increasing sales. Thanks to this development, 15% of customers have added an additional item during the check-out process. The success of this functionality meant that in 2024, it was added to other moments of the purchase process.

• Omnichannel check-out: allows the use of apps to complement the shopping experience in physical stores. Users can scan products to check prices and keep track of the total amount of their purchases.

• Ratings and reviews: With this functionality, users can rate products through a star rating system. They can also make reviews that, together with the ratings, can be consulted by other users, improving the shopping experience.

• Fast deliveries: Express is a landing page that allows users to consult a portfolio of products that correspond to the most frequently purchased by customers and that are delivered to their homes in a time window of a maximum of 30 minutes. This functionality has all the necessary integrations to support the work of logistics teams.

In addition, we defined a modular architecture that simplified the launch of campaigns without requiring additional development processes or mandatory application updates. Today, this modular architecture also facilitates the evolution and continuous improvement of the apps.

On the other hand, Pragma created guidelines to refactor code and monitor, identify, and classify application bugs to prioritize their solution and improve the user experience in an agile way.

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Grupo Éxito: this is how we enhanced the power of Éxito and Carulla apps

About the client

Our Outcome

How we did it?

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