Case Study: Zona Sul supermarket achieves rapid ecommerce growth and 47% conversion lift with VTEX

How Zona Sul is using ecommerce to digitally grow in grocery retail

Zona Sul, a 44‑store supermarket chain in Rio de Janeiro with a 20‑year digital journey, faced an aging in‑house ecommerce platform that couldn’t keep pace with market innovation and risked losing ground to more agile competitors — a problem made urgent by a 300% spike in daily online orders during the COVID‑19 lockdown. Seeking retail expertise over tech overhead, Zona Sul chose VTEX and its ecommerce platform (including VTEX IO and a composable front‑end approach) to modernize and scale its digital offering.

VTEX implemented a plug‑and‑play, API‑first solution with Professional Services support and Corebiz collaboration, enabling omnichannel operations (ship‑from‑store, curbside, pick‑up, WhatsApp ordering and a headless app) and rapid fixes during peak demand. Since going live in December 2020, the VTEX platform helped Zona Sul handle thousands of daily orders with 2–5 hour delivery windows, cut page load time by 70% and lift conversion by 47%, while enabling marketplace capabilities and ongoing innovation.

Zona Sul

Paulo Ballestero

Head of Digital