Cofares taps Fluent Commerce tech for new e-commerce platform
Spanish pharmaceuticals distribution company, Cofares, has rolled out a new distributed order management platform from Fluent Commerce with consulting firm VISEO Iberia.
Cofares decided at the end of 2019 that they wanted to replace their existing portal, where only pharmacists could order supplies from, to a new e-commerce platform which both customers and pharmacists could use and be able to choose how those products were delivered to them.
Spanish customers now have the option of buying over the counter products and health products from a Cofares pharmacy and having those goods delivered to their homes or they can Click and Collect.
The Fluent Commerce platform enables the pharmacies to fulfil those orders from their stores (as they have a real-time view of inventory) and they can also process returns of any products bought online.
Cofares chose Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Fluent Commerce for their new platform. VISEO started implementing it in April 2020. This involved working through approximately 20,000 SKUs of products held in 38 of Cofare’s warehouses.
“We wanted a new cloud-based platform that was easy for our pharmacists and customers to use, that we could implement and roll-out in under six months,” says Fernando Monfort, Head of E-commerce, Cofares.
“We didn’t require heavy customisation but we did need reassurance that Fluent’s order management platform would be able to easily cope with 500,000 orders each year and 2,000 pharmacies using the system.”
“We certainly got that reassurance and could see the flexibility in the platform to support the projects we have planned for 2021.”
By August, the internal tests of the Fluent Commerce platform had been done, with pharmacies able to make orders directly through the system and Cofares had started to roll-out its communications programme to pharmacists.
“This implementation was a great team effort. We had to deliver the implementation remotely of course, because of Covid-19, so teams in Australia, the UK, France and Spain had to come together to ensure the programme milestones were hit on time,” says Javier Morago, Director of Customer Success, VISEO.
“We know the new order management system from Fluent Commerce will help each of the respective pharmacies grow their businesses at the same time as improving the experience for their customers.”
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