Mercadona is strong in the e-commerce scene. The Spanish supermarket chain has just reinforced its digital sales service with the opening of a new hive. It is a fifth logistics macro-warehouse located in the city of Seville that will be in charge of distributing online orders in the western part of Andalusia. With this commitment to e-commerce, the Valencian firm It plans to reach a turnover of 530 million euros this year through the Internettwenty more than last year.
Specifically, the company directed by Juan Roig has just acquired a space of more than thirty thousand square meters in the Higuerón Sur Business Park under public tender. It is an investment of around twenty-five million euros and which will initially employ a staff of one hundred and fifty people. With the opening of this new hive, Mercadona Online reaches two thousand workers and exceeds the figures registered in 2020 by five thousand, in the midst of the pandemic.
This fifth store will have the function of conveying all those purchases that are made virtually in a radius of action that at the moment includes the areas of Seville, Huelva and a large part of Cádiz, although the idea is to cover more territory with the passing of the weeks. From the general management of Mercadona Online, Juana Roig explains that this web aspect of the company is now facing the challenge of expansion and expects to reach most of the Spanish provinces in the coming years.
Cybersecurity as a starting point
The team that shapes this project is made up mostly of order pickers and specialized distributors, always with the idea of maintaining the logistics chain at the highest level. However, beyond the employees who occupy their posts in the warehouse itself, Mercadona Online also includes a technological segment called Mercadona Tech that is in charge of maintaining and developing the company’s web portal.
Aware of the opportunities offered by online business, this Mercadona sub-area has strengthened the cybersecurity section to protect users from the threat of computer hacking in payment gateways. The idea is none other than to awaken greater confidence among buyers, and for this, the technological equipment used by the great references in this field, such as banking entities and gambling platforms, has been implemented.
In the first case, the new batch of virtual banks usually encrypt sensitive customer information so that it is not exposed on the network to third parties. The software they use is known as the SSL certificate (Secure sockets layer), whose task is to hide personal data (account numbers, names, passwords, etc.) that are deposited on the web and then transferred to the server. .
In this sense, the spaces that are dedicated to gambling on the Internet also invest a large part of their budget in the cyber protection of users, especially when it comes to avoiding profile impersonations. In fact, the Reliable online casinos in Spain They are those that incorporate into their web structure the so-called KYC (Know your customer) system, an identity verification protocol used by the rooms to confirm that the players who try to access their account are really who they say they are. The mechanism is simple but effective: the casino electronically requests all the necessary documentation from the user to later compare it with what already exists in its database.
A promising evolution
The numbers that Mercadona’s web ordering area has been collecting clearly invite optimism. At the end of the 2021 financial year, the company managed to invoice 257 million euros on this plot, that is, 45% more than in the previous campaign. The economic rebound was thanks to the rise in the volume of orders, which went from 1.2 million in 2020 to 1.8 million last year. The forecast indicates that this upward trend will end up doubling the numbers at the end of this last quarter.
The Seville hive is already the fifth that the company has in operation; the rest are located in Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid and Alicante. All of them, which respond to the high level of demand that occurs in these areas of the national territory, have involved an investment of more than seventy million euros, to which are added another twenty million that have been destined to create a fleet of four hundred eco-friendly trucks. This expansion makes it possible to offer customers much shorter delivery times, as well as an uninterrupted service from Monday to Saturday.
Mercadona Online thus consolidates itself in a market, that of electronic commerce, which experienced a spectacular rebound in Spain during the blow of the pandemic and which has maintained its growth rate to date. The sector has gone from registering a sales volume of thirty billion euros to almost doubling that same figure in just five years. Not surprisingly, according to the data handled by the PayRetailers payment platform, the trend in this last quarter of the course, already with Black Friday finished off and Christmas ahead, is leaving a rise of fifty percent compared to the same period of 2017.