H-E-B México is a widely recognized grocery and general merchandise retail chain with a strong focus on customer service, innovation and operational excellence.

The company is the Mexican division of the San Antonio, Texas-based supermarket chain H-E-B Grocery Company. Since breaking ground with its first store in Monterrey in 1997, the company has expanded to more than 80 stores across seven northern Mexican states.

The company’s wide range of customers has high expectations: fast, reliable service, whether in-store or online. To meet these demands, H-E-B México must help customers find what they need in a heartbeat while ensuring product availability for home delivery, local shopping and, more recently, in-store pickup (BOPIS).

The challenge

Modernizing and transforming its ecommerce platform

In 2023, with the launch of a new mobile app, H-E-B México modernized its ecommerce platform to strengthen the omnichannel shopping experience, migrating to VTEX and a composable architecture.

The company’s existing search engine lacked the real-time indexing, relevance tuning and scalability needed to support the migration and its new mobile app. Taking advantage of its new composable architecture, the digital commerce team looked to implement a search solution that was faster, offered more powerful merchandising functionality and provided the real-time data capabilities needed to incorporate inventory availability.

“We relied on VTEX native search, but found it restrictive, especially in ranking customization, indexing performance and analytics,” says Gerardo Ayala, Head of Digital Commerce at H-E-B México. 

Having previous experience with Algolia, Ayala knew the search solution would meet the company’s evolving needs and line up with his composable commerce vision. “It was not a discovery. We already knew the value Algolia could bring,” he says. 

Of course, Ayala and his team still had to prove that value to a skeptical senior management team: “It was difficult to sell internally, because the idea was, people are only looking for eggs or milk, maybe we don’t need something very complex.” 

Fortunately, with the Algolia team’s proactive support, clear documentation and availability, the team was able to easily demonstrate impact. That hands-on partnership helped the team build internal confidence and showcased how advanced search could meaningfully improve the customer experience, even the company’s straightforward use case.

The solution

Powering a personalized customer experience with alacrity

With the support of system integrator Vinneren and under the leadership of H-E-B México’s Ecommerce Product Manager Julio Quebedo, the company deployed Algolia on the company’s Mi Tienda (“My Store”) site and mobile app in less than two months.

“Features like federated search, typo tolerance, white box tuning and real-time indexing made Algolia a strong match for our needs,” Quebedo says. He adds that Algolia provided the speed and flexibility the company needed, along with strong support for both business and technical users.

The company initially implemented a range of powerful Algolia features, including Personalization, Dynamic Re-ranking, Semantic Search, Visual Merchandising Studio, Federated Search, AI Synonyms and advanced analytics around CTR, CVR and click position. These features allowed H-E-B México tune discovery and relevance without constant developer work, account for regional phrasing, customize experiences by customer and store, and future-proof their search functionality. 

Algolia powers much more than search for the company. For example, product detail pages (PDP), product listing pages (PLP), category landing pages (CLP) and more are all provided through Algolia — all automatically rendered based on the customer with weights assigned based on their preference.

In fact, Ayala says the entire ecommerce platform is powered by Algolia. “Currently, Algolia indexes all the promotions, inventory, products, and all the data. We use it to render the site — even the product detail pages in our mobile app are rendered by Algolia.”

The results

Serving customers with an outstanding omnichannel shopping experience

One of the cornerstones of H-E-B México is the freshness of its produce. It’s little surprise then that providing real-time, location-based inventory availability has been a massive boon in maintaining the company’s high customer experience.

Algolia has empowered a real-time relevance and personalized shopping experience for H-E-B México. It has also given its teams — product, merchandising and analytics — full control of merchandising without developer involvement. Granular analytics and segmentation by store powered by Algolia help merchandising to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

“Speed and personalization are now baseline expectations,” Ayala says, adding that the real power from their new platform is in the difference it has made in loyalty, conversions and order value coming from personalization, event tracking and optimized relevance.

“Using the advanced tools Algolia provides — machine learning and AI — it was easier for us to improve results for customers and boost sales,” he says, noting how business users can now tune discovery through Dynamic Re-ranking and Personalization with relative ease.

Thanks to the optimized relevance from Algolia, the company has seen:

• +34% in search speed

• More than 270 million search-as-you-type queries annually

• Event-driven merchandising optimization

Perhaps most importantly, Algolia’s high performance and solid reliability have freed up his team to focus on building meaningful customer experiences rather than putting out infrastructure-related fires. “Algolia’s stability is something that we are thrilled with,” he says. “I don’t recall a day when Algolia was down. That’s amazing!”

H-E-B México is currently piloting retail media integrations, planning to deploy Algolia on its main website and investigating how the search solution can support in-store kiosks and smart scales at self-checkouts. For Ayala, Algolia is more than a vendor. It’s a vital component in the company’s innovative vision for the future and customer service.

“When we design experiences with empathy and clarity, everyone wins — not just the business, but the community.”