This post about La Redoute is part of Tamebay’s January 2018 Marketplaces series.
Web address: www.laredoute.fr
Marketplace overview
La Redoute has been long established in France as a fashion and homewares brand specialising in middle range to high hand stock. in 2010 it expanded its online offering to include a marketplace feature to allow third party sellers to sell goods on there too. La Redoute is a well know and respected brand in France selling high end fashion and homewares. With 10 million unique visitors each month and 11 million registered shoppers in 26 countries, but predominantly shoppers are French. This platform targets customers with a relatively high spending power (€95 is the average basket per visit). The target audience for La Redoute is women between 20 and 45 with 90% of customers being female.
Don’t forget, as with Amazon, you’ll be competing with La Redoute. There’s a roughly 50/50split between goods sold by them and those sold by third party retailers.
Third party sellers can sell new products across the marketplace but must offer listings and customer support in French. You must also offer a French address with which to receive returns.
La Redoute seller registration and requirements
Because La Redoute is a prestigious brand, typically registration is by invitation only. But some of the multi-channel providers, notably Channel Advisor, do offer to make an introduction via your account manager if they think you’re a good fit. If you sell more than €35k worth of goods in France then you’ll need to be registered with the French tax authorities.
It can take several weeks to be approved as a seller and you will need to sign an agreement.
Product listings and fulfilment
You must offer your products in Euros, and you’ll also receive your disbursements in Euros every 30 days. You fulfil your sales yourself and must offer tracking as standard.
There are no listing fees and commissions on sale vary from 8% to 20%, on top of a €49 per monthly subscription.
Listings must be presented in French, which will need to be professionally translated to La Redoute’s standards: automated translations are not acceptable. They require an EAN as a unique product identifier and your SKU identifiers must be less than 32 characters. La Redoute requires square images of at least 400×400 pixels but recommend 1200×1200 so shoppers can effectively zoom in as they browse.
It offers an API to assist with listings and is integrated with a number of multi-channel management services including Channel Adviser and Lengow.
Tamebay’s take on La Redoute
This marketplace is an ideal option for sophisticated sellers of fashion and homewares goods whowant to to be part of a big French retailers offering. But you’ll need to be fairly established and likely already well organised to convince them you’re suitable.
Probably the biggest problem to overcome will be language and you’ll benefit from having a fluent French speaker on your team to deal with customer enquiries.
If you have you any experience selling on La Redoute, please do share your wisdom.
