2020: The challenge that no one expected

No one was expecting such a great challenge as the one that 2020 brought us. We lived through a year that transformed many things in our lives: priorities, expectations, plans and certainties.

The digital world, which was previously an option for entrepreneurs and SMEs in the region, has become a priority in various situations.

In this stage, we saw e-commerce reach a new level. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 anticipated the future of e-commerce in Latin America and, with it, many new online stores and new consumers who buy online on a recurring basis emerged. This represented a great challenge and, at the same time, an enormous opportunity for many businesses in the region.

To keep up with all these changes, Tiendanube also had to adapt and our mission of promote success stories became more relevant than ever.

For this reason, in order to maintain our commitment to entrepreneurs, brands and SMEs throughout Latin America, we set out to provide them with close support and focus our efforts on improving our product and service. These are some data that account for the results of these efforts:

• +160 new features and improvements: our technology team worked every day to add new possibilities and help entrepreneurs take better advantage of the platform;
• +300 thousand messages answered: we provide more than 3,500 hours of customer service to help them boost their business;
• +160 live, webinars and events: we generate content to help our community succeed with their businesses;
• + 330 people in the team: our team grew too! This year we doubled the team of collaborators (from 150 in March to more than 330 in December) who work every day developing new functionalities, improving your store’s platform, solving any problems that may arise and providing you with relevant content and information to enhance your success story.;
• + 70 thousand active stores: from March to November, our customer base increased by 180%, and today we managed to support each of these stores, and in addition, our customers sold 4 times more!;
• 98.99% of the time trading successfully: our increasingly robust infrastructure ensured the operation of a stable platform, even for the large number of stores and sales generated during 2020.

This year we also achieved a very important milestone in our history: we received a to continue building the largest ecommerce ecosystem in Latin America.

All these results were not easy to achieve. Like entrepreneurs and SMEs, from Tiendanube we also had to rethink the planning we had for this year.

During 2020, and as we told you above, our team worked at full steam and developed more than 160 functionalities and applications so that the cloud stores could keep their businesses active and selling, in addition to working on optimize service availability Y help with content and personalized attention.

Here we share some of the main improvements of the year.

A robust service and infrastructure

The growth of e-commerce in the region was accompanied by great technical challenges. As visits and sales increase, so does the demand on the servers that keep the service running.

Since we started seeing this trend, the technical team worked to prepare the platform for this growth in demand.

After a while, Hot Sale arrived in Argentinafrom July 27 to 29, where this large amount of traffic and sales was evidenced: three days in which the Tiendanube platform was active 99.99% of the time with record demand. The same thing happened in (November 2 to 4), another date in which the platform remained operational all the time and a new sales record was generated.

With this work on the infrastructure, throughout the year we managed to keep our customers’ stores active 98.99% of the time. In the future, our goal is to guarantee the stability of the platform at a value greater than 99.95% of the time.

A simpler and more comprehensive management

During this year, we made different improvements to help you optimize times and add possibilities in the management of your store. We share the main functionalities that we launched,

• Draft store to test new templates and changes to your design before publishing them: To make a process as important as customizing your design more practical, you can now choose a new design and make changes to a draft store, without this having an impact on your online store. so you can try the options you want and apply the changes in your ecommerce when you prefer, or you can prepare the design of your store for a special date and launch it at the most relevant moment.
• Management of all your sales on a single platform: a business can have different sales channels, in addition to an online store (WhatsApp, Instagram or even a physical location or show room). To unify the management of your business within the Tiendanube platform, we made it possible to include sales made through other channels in your administration panel. In this way, you can manage all your sales data, regardless of the channel through which they were made, on a single platform!
• Stock history of your products: there are different scenarios and actions that can generate changes in the stock of an online store, such as the purchase of a product, the return of an order, sales in other channels, replenishment of stock, among others. So that you can quickly identify the reason for these changes, we have created a section in your administration panel called “Stock History“, where you can see the detail of the stock movements of your products, guaranteeing a better monitoring of the stock of each one of them. they.

An optimized experience for your consumers

In addition to facilitating your management, we focus on improving your customers’ shopping experience, to make it easier and faster and thus get more sales.

With this objective, we launched improvements such as:

• Checkout optimization to increase conversions: We implemented a new purchase flow for your checkout, giving more visibility to the delivery methods, we reduced the amount of data requested to complete it, and we intelligently organized the shipping options based on price.
• More visibility for the color variants of your products: now users who visit your store can see, both on the home and product pages, the different color options available for each item, showing the colors below the photo.

Flexibility across different applications

Our mission also leads us to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem, not only enabling the business of our clients but also that of our business partners. This year, the number of new applications integrated into the ecosystem increased by 80%, with 55+ integrations to dateand we keep adding!

Some of the most prominent are:

• +10 new shipping applications: We know the importance of offering the best delivery method for both you and your client. That’s why we focus on integrating more and more shipping options, from same-day shipping to drop-off points and shipping nationwide. Some examples of these applications aren , a service with personalized attention that takes care of the entire logistics process, helping you to lower your operating costs; , a national network of “Smart Lockers” to dispatch and receive packages at points or lockers, with the option of pick-up service and home delivery as well; Y a Mail aimed at providing a comprehensive solution for your shipments, which allows you to manage logistics in a very simple way.
• + : cs applications that help you increase your average ticket, selling more with each order. With Cross selling you can generate offers that are shown to your customers when they add products to the cart, offering related products; while product kit Combine up to three products from your store and create a new single product that groups them together, making shopping easier for your customers.
• : This application helps you sell more by quickly answering the queries of your online store visitors and improving the experience of buyers. It offers you a Chatbot, WhatsApp, a CRM and a live chat so you can provide answers 24/7.
• : Marketing can go a long way! That’s why Socialroot helps you create notifications dynamic and interactive for your store visitors, offering them promotions or showing your latest sales as social proof. It’s like seeing a shop full of people: something interesting must have!

Serving different types of businesses

In order to adapt our platform to businesses of different types and sizes, we also expanded our platform and ecosystem.

For example, with quarantine and social distancing, the need to buy and sell digital products grew; that’s why, We optimize the checkout process for digital products or services, so that consumers do not have to provide information that does not apply to those products.

To complete the experience and streamline our customers’ day-to-day activities, we launched Magic Share, an application that automates the process of sending files or digital content.

Support and education through content

Finally, this year we are also focused on providing you with all the advice and recommendations that could be useful to continue developing your business:

• At the beginning of 2020 we share the our exclusive annual e-commerce report, with the main results of e-commerce in 2019 and the trends for 2020.
• As soon as ASPO (Preventive and Mandatory Social Isolation) began, and as part of our #WeAreTogether campaign, we created special content with . We knew that difficult months were coming and our goal was (and is) to accompany you at all times.
• With this same objective, we also made more than 55 live on Instagram to bring you news, good practices and learning, talking with experts on different topics from the world of digital marketing, ecommerce, and business, with entrepreneurs who were going through the same challenge.
• We organize live webinars with more than 10 ecosystem partners to help you optimize your business.
• We created the “Cloud News” section in our website to bring you the latest news about the platform and the world of ecommerce before anyone else.
• We share success stories to inspire you and we created a special series: “Reinvent yourself in times of pandemic” with businesses that in 2020 were resilient and dared to successfully reinvent their work.
• We publish various articles on our blog with topics of interest for the growth of your brand, from digital marketing to payment and shipping methods. We also share complete guides so you can sell more in…