Selgros - customer-centric marketing app

Selgros Cash & Carry, a German wholesale company founded in 1959, is part of the Transgourmet Group, co-owned by Coop Switzerland. Operating 38 stores across Germany, Selgros provides high-quality household goods and food to businesses, restaurants, and caterers.

With approximately 6,000 employees, Selgros offers a diverse range of around 50,000 products, including fresh and packaged foods, as well as non-food items like kitchenware and electronics. Renowned for its fresh offerings, the company boasts exceptional meat, fish, and bakery departments. The wholesaler serves various sectors, but has a particular focus on hotels, restaurants and catering (HoReCa) as well as private gourmet customers.

Selgros recognised that the app had to be improved to be a well-functioning marketing tool for customer loyalty.

Transgourmet’s consolidation of all websites onto a unified technology platform enabled the integration of mobile applications, available to all subsidiaries, including Selgros. Selgros recognised the opportunity to take advantage of this modernisation for their own benefit and decided to renew the Selgros marketing app, aligning it with the overall CMS for improved functionality and efficiency.

With the new app, marketers now centrally manage content, products and access rights across all channels. Using the Drupal backend, they can schedule and personalise push messages for app users, targeting all customers or specific groups.

The new app not only facilitates customer interaction, but also makes shopping more convenient. The mobile app displays local and current promotions, links coupons, allows the creation of shopping lists and integrates advertising brochures - a benefit for every customer and a modern loyalty tool. 

With well over half a million installations, the app has been widely embraced by users. Thanks to its convenience and personalised content, including tailored offers and product information, the app encourages customers to visit Selgros more often, make more informed purchasing decisions and spend more. Available on both iOS and Android, the app loads quickly and works very well, even when offline.

The highlights for the customers

Everyday companion

The customer cards are displayed in the app and on the phone's home screen, acting as a digital shopping card. Any logged in customer will see the prices that apply to them. If you have several cards, the app allows you to switch between them.

Useful information

The app has useful features such as language selection (German, English, Polish and Romanian - depending on the market location) and integrated localisation to find the closest Selgros store, and prices with and without VAT.

It offers features like finding specific items by scanning the product code, digital shopping lists that can be saved as text documents, and personalised information about preferred markets and opening hours.

Personalisation

Personalised push messages and banners remind customers of current promotions. Recommendations and tailored content such as recipes foster customer loyalty. Customers can configure the display between light and dark mode to enjoy the preferred display method.

Exclusive offers

Personalised coupons generate the best conversion rates. Users receive exclusive coupons that are available at the click of a button and redeemed directly from the app at checkout. These coupons are managed in the Drupal backend and scheduled for specific groups of customers to be redeemed directly from the app at checkout.

EAN code scanning

Innovative features, like product code scanning make life easier for customers and enhance the shopping experience. By using the camera of their mobile phone, customers can scan EAN codes, quickly find products and immediately add them to their shopping list.

Selgros, as part of the Transgourmet Group, uses the unified digital platform built on Drupal. Positive past experiences reinforced the decision to use Drupal for the CMS and React Native for the application. The digital solution based on Drupal allows the entire company to work on a single, centralised platform. Updates are only made once and are available to all subsidiaries, minimising redundancy and significantly reducing IT costs.

This setup also allows Selgros to benefit from economies of scale as resources are efficiently shared across the company, maximising both performance and budget. Since both Drupal CMS and Commercetools e-commerce platform are API-first frameworks, they can be used to provide content for native apps.

React Native for the app

The app is implemented in React Native. One of the main advantages of using React Native is its cross-compatibility. Developers can create a single codebase and use it for multiple platforms, for example, iOS and Android. This saves a lot of time in development, and thereby costs are reduced significantly.