PicPay Grows 104% During Black Friday 2025 With VTEX Marketplace

PicPay is one of Brazil's largest digital banks, bringing payment solutions and everyday services together in its app. As it expanded its business, the brand created an in-app shopping channel to give its customer base a complete marketplace experience.

PicPay already offered products in the app, but only through affiliate programs: when users clicked an item, they were redirected to a partner environment. While this expanded the product mix available on the platform, it created a fragmented journey and limited PicPay's role in key stages of the experience, from merchandising to conversion.

Beyond the customer experience, there was a strategic consideration. As a financial institution, PicPay needed purchases to take place within its ecosystem so it could apply its own payment incentives and terms, supported by rules and validations already established in its financial engine. Under the previous model, transaction processing and payment methods varied by partner, limiting this differentiator.

The objective was therefore clear: evolve beyond a storefront by creating an in-app marketplace with catalog governance, seller integrations, and a technology foundation built to scale, without giving up PicPay's checkout and payments.

The selected architecture was a headless marketplace, with VTEX serving as the commerce and marketplace engine. This allowed PicPay to build the shopping experience entirely within the app while using VTEX to orchestrate the catalog and order back end.

To streamline marketplace operations, PicPay engaged Omnik, a seller center within the VTEX ecosystem. The partner joined the project and accelerated delivery by providing standardized processes and integrations for essential marketplace activities, including catalog setup and operations management.

For checkout and payments, PicPay chose to retain its own checkout, since the bank had a mature engine with extensive business rules, incentives, and highly specific validations. The headless approach made it possible to maintain this control while still registering orders in VTEX in a way that was compatible with the project workflow.

The go-live began with a limited group of sellers and was followed by an expansion strategy that advanced rapidly with support from the VTEX partner ecosystem. PicPay also benefited from the VTEX customer base, whose merchants can integrate with the marketplace quickly and easily.

With VTEX technology, PicPay expanded beyond its affiliate model to operate its own marketplace channel, with an end-to-end journey within the app. Users can browse, select, and complete a purchase without leaving the bank's environment. This created a more consistent experience, greater governance over orders, and more control over moments that are critical to conversion.

Black Friday 2025 was the first major test of the new operation at scale, and it validated the transformation. With the marketplace and financial engine working together, PicPay Shop achieved sales volume 3x higher than the average of the other months.

Transactions grew 104% versus November of the previous year, demonstrating the operation's consistent progress. At the same time, average visits to the shopping hub rose 68% year over year, indicating that the channel had taken on a more relevant role within the app.

Beyond the performance results, delivery was a strategic achievement in itself. The project was completed in four months, combining a composable, headless architecture, ecosystem partners, and close technical collaboration between VTEX and PicPay. What had been a redirect-based model became a structured, scalable operation ready to grow within the app itself.