Dark stores, where consumers can shop online, have grown significantly in the last two years, driven by the pandemic and changes in shopping habits.

An example of this is the Colombian company Merqueo, which arrived at the end of 2019 to install its business model in Mexico City (CDMX) and the metropolitan area under its own electronic platform and now has plans to expand its presence in the country.

The company offers the sale of products through an online application (app), with which it triggers a logistics activity in the four dark stores that it has so far in the country's capital.

One of them is Vallejo, with 2,500 m2, where 100 people in 3 daily shifts meet the demand for products from the northern zone of CDMX and, in addition, supplies its other dark stores installed in Santa Fe, Guaymas and San Simón. 

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This dark store offers just over 6,000 SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit) and currently stores 200 thousand items divided into 80% dry products and 20% perishable, for this last operation they have 3 containers where they maintain temperatures between 2 and 5 ° and - 15 and -20°.

Javier Santiago, director of operations for Merqueo in Mexico, announced that the company will invest up to 12 million pesos in the near future to expand the storage capacity of this dark store three times.

The company's strategy is to have direct relationships with producers and suppliers, numbering between 400 and 500, of merchandise to generate cost savings and time efficiencies, and thus be able to reflect this in product prices for the final consumer.

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The delivery offer to final consumers is divided into fast, ultra-fast and next day, all of them with different clauses (as a minimum purchase value) to offer free services, focused on providing a "pleasant" customer experience.

The company plans to expand operations this year to cities such as Guadalajara, Monterrey, Cuernavaca, Toluca y Puebla, as a strategy to compete in a low-margin market where they seek to reach all of Mexico as quickly as possible, said Jairo Medina, country manager of the company. 

In Solili you can consult industrial buildings available in Querétaro and Guanajuato 

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