Costco Wholesale Corp. is building out its international e-commerce strategy with a new web site for Mexico at Costco.com.mx.
Costco, No. 16 in the Internet Retailer Top 500, now operates four distinct e-commerce sites, for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Mexico.
The Mexican site launched last October in time for Mexico’s holiday shopping season. During El Buen Fin, Mexico’s annual kick-off weekend in November for holiday season sales, Costco exceeded its online sales target by 200%, the retailer says.
But while the sites for the United States and Canada share a similar design and both operate on e-commerce technology from IBM Corp., sites for the United Kingdom and Mexico share another design developed on e-commerce software from hybris Software. Hybris is a unit of business software provider and IBM competitor SAP AG.
Costco worked with Torino, Italy-based web design and development firm Reply S.p.A., which helped launch Costco’s U.K. site, Costco.co.uk, in 2012. Like the U.K. site, the new e-commerce site for Mexico, at Costco.com.mx, is connected with SideUp Reply, Reply’s web-based warehouse management system. SideUp Reply updates the availability of products displayed on the site based on what Costco’s inventory levels.
Costco.com. mx is hosted on the web through Google Inc.’s Google Cloud Platform services, which includes Google Compute Engine for transacting data and Google Cloud SQL for storing data. “The solution developed by Reply, hybris and Google has also allowed Costco to open a feature rich, dependable and scalable web site in a fully outsourced model,” says Don Burdick, a Costco senior vice president. “The Mexico and U.K. sites have exceeded our expectations for performance and extensibility, and Costco will continue partnering with Reply, Google and hybris in other geographies in the years to come.”
The new e-commerce site features shopping pages that look much like those on the U.K. site. The home page, for example, features a similar design template with an alternating hero image in the upper left corner, a horizontal navigation bar near the top and a grid of products on the bottom.
The home pages on the U.S. and Canadian sites, in contrast, display a left-side vertical navigation and an alternating hero image on the upper right corner.
Each of the four sites display localized content. For example, the Mexico site features all content in the Spanish language and Mexican currency, while the Canada site lets shoppers choose either English or French language with currency in Canadian dollars.
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