Spryker, an e-commerce leader which specializes in enabling large companies to become digital pioneers across B2B, and online marketplaces, has announced that Mexican CPG wholesaler Mercado Mayco has chosen its innovative cloud-native platform-as-a-service solution and API tools as the basis for a new digital channel. This will transform the re-stocking experience for its 6,300 corner grocery store customers and drive a doubling of sales.
Mayco is a regional leader in its field, operating across 17 locations serving the north-eastern Mexican states of Nuevo León, Coahuila, Zacatecas and Durango. It has served family-run corner stores in the region for the last 30 years, and sees a fully-featured, user-friendly B2B e-commerce experience as the logical next step to bringing its customers maximum choice and convenience.
This in turn will drive a massive uptick in sales—doubling revenues within five years. Says José Manuel Esparza, head of digital commerce at Mercado Mayco, said: “Our annual sales have been exclusively via traditional, physical channels. Our goal is to double our sales figures within five years, through these new digital channels.”
To fuel this scale of growth, Mayco needed to be sure of the right technology supplier. “Without a strong technological base, we could have the best go to market and growth strategy, the best products, but at the time of execution run into roadblocks and speed bumps that could have been averted,” José notes.
Mayco wanted a setup that would allow the company to design the right digital experiences for its customers, and the flexibility to experiment at speed to identify such experiences, José explains. “We researched Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for digital commerce and quickly identified Spryker as a top option.”
Spryker offers a full suite of e-commerce tools for businesses—a platform to bring a company’s B2B inventory online; tools to analyse and measure how that inventory is selling and where; plus options to add voice commerce, subscriptions, Click & Collect, IoT commerce and other new features and channels. It categorizes its B2B e-commerce proposition as ‘headless’, meaning that users access an API-based architecture and other easy-to-integrate modules or tools delivered via a cloud-native Platform as a Service (PaaS) model.
This approach appealed strongly to Mayco because of the scale of its ambitions, and its keenness to experiment at speed, to find and hone the ideal experience for its customers. “The headless model offers us the capability to launch a lot of strategies with great speed,” José says. It also supports maximum agility, allowing Mayco to launch digital experiences with a minimum viable product (MVP) and add new features over time, he adds.
Mayco’s B2B plans are pioneering in Mexico and will shine a light on what’s possible. “Today, corner store owners in Mexico incur significant opportunity costs in their re-stocking process,” José explains. “They often have to close the shop, pay for transportation, devote time to product selection at their favourite wholesaler, and finally travel back and unload the goods purchased.
“All that time could be devoted to more profitable activities, or to improving owners’ work-life balance. Our plan is to launch a B2B digital platform comprising web and mobile applications that will save time for corner store owners in their restocking process.”
Mayco sees the relationship with Spryker as the start of something important and longstanding. “This partnership will enable us to be at the forefront of digital commerce innovation for the benefit of our customers,” José says.
Commenting on the strategic importance of Mayco’s digital ambitions and the company’s partnership with Spryker, Felipe Jiménez Beltrán, Mercado Mayco’s Founder & CEO, said, “This is an important channel of innovation, and we want to invite all CPG brands to join us in this quest to help make corner store owners’ lives better.”
Spryker recently closed a round of funding worth $130 million, which it plans to use to extend its range of agile e-commerce tools for B2B suppliers, and to support international growth.
