It has been revealed that Carrefour Spain is set to launch an online marketplace open to merchants with the aim of offering a much bigger selection of goods to Spanish shoppers. They want to increase their product range from 100k to 2 million with the launch of the marketplace that will be open to third party merchants. Carrefour has already open marketplaces in France and Poland and a version for Belgium is on the way. The Carrefour network in Europe could could become very interesting for merchants.
We consider that it is a disruptive and quite interesting idea for our customers. The biggest advantage of a marketplace is the speed: to be able to have a wide offer in a very short time. A marketplace is a magical place that can bring together the interests of customers and sellers.
– Rafael Sánchez-Sendarrubias, director of ecommerce, Carrefour España
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the plan will be the click & collect aspect. Carrefour has many locations in Spain, ranging from huge hypermarkets to smaller outlets, and shoppers will be able to collect their purchases from a local store. And it was also revealed that Carrefour will be positioning digital terminals in shops so customers can make online purchases. As Amazon has revealed with collection lockers in branches of Whole Foods, such features can increase footfall in store.
Carrefour is already a significant online player in Spain with 87 million visits, 35 million unique users and about 320 million page views per year, according to reports.
Needless to say, lots of details remain unclear (the announcement was only made this week at a retail event in Spain). The terms under which merchants might be able to start selling on the Carrefour Spain marketplace, what the selections criteria will be and what sort of products they will be looking for are sketchy. And, needless to say, there is no word on fees or terms in general. Will merchants from outside of Spain be able to plug in? That’s all unknown as yet. But it is still early days.
This new development is part of an increasing trend from retailers to increase their offering by hosting sales for third party merchants and is to be welcomed. And supermarket chains are in a good position to open up their doors and extensive networks. It’s just a shame we haven’t yet seen a credible, open example in the UK yet.
8 Responses
Currently selling on carrefour.es is already possible. There are easy integration possibilities for webshops and ERP platforms as well because we added carrefour as a marketplace channel on our integration platform. You can read more or signup via https://www.channelengine.com/channels/carrefour/
Hi James and Tyler,
Thanks for your feedback. We are currently A/B testing between showing the prices and hiding them to test the conversion rates on our site. Valuable feedback as you wouldn’t bother to test or contact us.
Our pricing is straightforward, we charge a small percentage of the actual sales: https://www.channelengine.com/pricing/. There is tiered pricing available for volume sellers. That includes unlimited channels, products, features and proactive support and optimisation advice.
We’ll gladly give you a demo.
Kind regards,
Jorrit Steinz
* Minimum fee: €79,- per month, so no incentive then for Carrefour to get your items sold as they are guaranteed €79 per month if your items sell or not. For that reason I’m out.
If you want people to try your marketplace then you need to give them no minimum charges for at least 3 months to make sure that it is worthwhile. I’m not stumping up €79 per month in the hope that sales volume will exceed that amount eventually.
@tyler, thanks for your response. Nobody likes taxes 🙂
Some companies find our pricing very favorable to only pay a small percentage when our platform and our expertise helps them grow their sales successfully on multiple marketplaces. But some don’t. It mostly depends I guess on the position of your company in the supply chain. For instance for brands (including white label) , wholesales, distributors, manufacturers and large retailers it make more sense compared to smaller resellers that can usually do a lot themselves and have the time to dive deep into the marketplace specifics as wel, while they have much smaller margins to work with.
@darren
The monthly minimum is not for carrefour but for our integration and optimization platform and services. Our fee includes management of all the integrations with webshops, ERP, setup of marketplace connections and optimization of all the marketplace sales. So even if you connect 10 marketplaces and 8 comparison sites you would pay the minimum of 79 euros and a small percentage depending on the volume and services required. But as stated above, it won’t make sense for everyone 🙂
If you want to go to carrefour directly without an integration partner you can go to https://www.carrefour.es/e-commerce/marketplace/index_en.html