Easy24, an independent eB2B platform launched by the global wine & spirits leader Pernod Ricard, is an app that simplifies the B2B ordering experience for businesses like bars, restaurants and hotels or mom’s and pops’ stores.

The Easy24 app connects outlets to their wholesalers, streamlining and speeding up an otherwise lengthy process. This solution complements the work of sales teams, empowering them by streamlining the ordering experience. It transforms catalog sharing and ordering for wholesalers while offering brand partners key data for insights into their customers to maximize sales. Today, Easy24 has a strong presence across five countries — Mexico, Colombia, Spain, South Africa, and Singapore — with plans for further expansion.

The company has the entrepreneurial mindset of a startup, taking risks and learning fast in a bid to elevate its service offering. “We have the user at the heart of every decision,” says Matias Polero, CTO of Easy24. “We strive for transparency and 24x7 service, and our teams around the globe are hyper-engaged in our customer success.” 

The company’s global expansion has been a real success story and fuels Polero and the Easy24 team with excitement about the future.

Serving different user personas

The app itself has four distinct types of users, each with different needs that must be considered: owners of outlets, wholesalers, brand partners and Easy24 internal users.

The app handles ordering down the line from international brands, through various levels of wholesalers, to the final point of sales. At the same time, the platform provides to the commercial and marketing teams of brand companies with previously unavailable market insights: “Who is buying what, when, and at what price? Easy24 enables this visibility into the market, plus the ability to interact with the outlets directly through the application,” says Paul Parmentier, Head of Product at Easy24.

From an Easy24 internal perspective, the company’s back-office teams use the app for administrative tasks and occasionally process orders on behalf of wholesale reps.

A need for speed

In Easy24’s mission to simplify and improve the ordering experience for its customers, speed is essential. 

As the company grew, the initial open-source search solution used for search didn’t meet the speed or performance requirements needed to process multiple orders effectively. This caused a shortcoming in conversions and other KPIs, Polero says, and the company recognized it needed a new tool. In addition, to improve the user experience, they wanted to create a more personalized experience — all without losing speed. 

“We needed a state-of-the-art solution that provides high technical performance and that enables personalization. We could do that with open source, but of course, there’s a trade-off between make and buy,” Parmentier says. 

“Another factor was around monetization, generating revenue for Easy24 through rankings, banners and product recommendations. Again, this could be done with open source, but it takes time to understand the logic that already exists somewhere else and then develop and maintain the solution.”

Algolia for search and more

After reviewing several search solutions, the company chose Algolia because it met the requirement for high performance but also offered a broad set of search, recommendation and merchandising features that went above and beyond.

Easy24 is a custom-built solution and at every stage, the tech team must determine whether in-house development or the integration of an outside solution makes the best sense. Polero says Algolia was a “super straightforward” decision. “We are not going to do a search engine as well as Algolia.”

Easy24 implemented Algolia for Search, as well as a broad range of capabilities including Recommend, Analytics and Dynamic Re-ranking and Personalization. 

To aid its users in their bulk ordering process, which previously required searching for items one by one and took 10 to 20 minutes per order, Parmentier integrated Algolia into its in-house development. 

The integration allows the use of generative AI to extract product information and then send it to Algolia through a multi-search. In addition to enabling fast multi-search, Algolia provides direct real-time relevance customization, allowing adjustments to results in real-time. 

As a result, bulk ordering processing is significantly faster, with around 30 products searched and found in 20 seconds.

The company is using AI to improve search further. To overcome some limitations presented based on data quality, it’s currently in the process of using generative AI to automate data management and provide Algolia with cleaner data.

Improving user experience and KPIs

The Algolia implementation has improved the overall efficiency and user experience of the Easy24 platform.

For instance, Algolia Personalization has sped up processing by providing more relevant search results and recommendations based on user behavior. By presenting users with tailored options that matched their needs, time spent searching for products — which previously could take up to an hour — was reduced and the order process was further streamlined.

To track the impact of the AI multi-query capabilities and Algolia-powered search, Easy24 takes advantage of Algolia Analytics. In this way, the company can know not only who’s searching, but also what features they’re using, giving Easy24 visibility into the business impact of its new search functionality.

The company saw a huge change in performance even after just implementing Algolia’s core Search functionality — one related to its multiple user types. 

“We first noticed a change in the experience. We’re a mobile-first application, so the experience is always related to mobile,” says Polero. “But we have a PWA (progressive web application) working on the desktop, and there are desktop users. With Algolia, we can provide a different user experience, and it was super straightforward to do because we were already using the UI that comes with Algolia.”

He says that with the performance improvements, there have been fewer support requests and improvements in several KPIs. Conversion rates are up across countries, with an average increase of 30 to 40 percent. Spain, specifically, has experienced a growth from 20 percent to 78 percent in conversions due to enhanced search capabilities.

Meanwhile, Algolia has provided the search performance speed needed to improve the end user experience. Latency has been reduced significantly, averaging around 7 milliseconds. “That’s significantly better than what we had,” Polero says. “We don’t have the issues we once had with search. We don’t have performance issues or incorrect searches, and it has definitely improved user satisfaction.”

Value for internal teams

Algolia has also provided value across teams at Easy24, allowing functional and business teams to adjust to recommendations and boost rankings autonomously with little training. About 40 percent of Easy24’s staff, including technical and back-office personnel, are currently using Algolia.

Algolia has also helped Easy24 in its monetization goals by handling the logistics of rankings, boost banner creation and targeted rules to promote brands in specific contexts, such as a particular call center or business type.

Easy24 has seen strong competitive benefits both internally and externally thanks to the breadth of features and integration with its own multi-query AI solution. 

“Using the advanced search capabilities, personalization and data analytics of Algolia, we’ve improved efficiency, enhanced user satisfaction and, ultimately, seen increased conversions,”  Polero says. “We’ve also been able to better meet our commercial goals by promoting the right brands to the right users at the right time.”