Carrefour strategy for digital commerce: „we will be spending 2.8 billion euros by 2022, 560 million euros a year”

The Group will invest €2.8 billion over five years, or six times more than current investments, to gain a new dimension in digital and omnichannel (total of operating and capital expenditures). Carrefour’s ambition is to become a key player in food e-commerce, with €5bn in sales for the Group and market share of at least 20% in food e-commerce market in France by 2022.

Carrefour will rely on its physical network to offer to its customers a reliable and extensive omnichannel service:

Home delivery: All the delivery solutions offered by Carrefour will see their reliability enhanced and be generalized. In France, home delivery will be extended to 26 cities by 2018, and 1-hour express delivery will be deployed in 15 cities in 2018;

Drive: Carrefour must improve the quality of service and extend its Drive offer. As of 2018, 170 new Drive will be opened in France and the overall quality of service will be improved, notably thanks to the deployment of automated logistics means (partly-automated warehouse);

Click & Collect: Click & Collect will be expanded to more than half of the stores by 2019.

Handling of the last mile for deliveries will be considerably enhanced and accelerated through the partnership Carrefour is announcing today with Stuart, a subsidiary of the La Poste group.

„In order to be omni-channel, our e-commerce offer must be powerful everywhere; Carrefour cannot be successful in years to come unless it has a powerful omni-channel strategy.  This is our priority and we will put all of our efforts into this. We will invest massively in digital commerce, we will be spending 2.8 billion euros by 2022: 560 million euros a year – that is 6 times as much as we are doing today.”, says Alexandre Bompard,  Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

„Right now, the digital offer is neither homogeneous nor satisfactory.  It is quite understandable: we have as many as eight e-commerce sites that are not connected and 14 applications.  Our customers can’t find their way through this.   So, we are going to revamp the entire set of Internet sites, so we have a single merchant website in each country.  (…) For this to be successful, I am proud to announce that we have signed a partnership with Sapient, the technological partner of Publicis. Sapient will provide its expertise to enable us to develop our e-commerce business.   This is a new expression of our new approach: we want to find the right partners for the right issues. „

One of these strategic partners is Tencent in China, with nearly 1 billion users per month, well known for WeChat, the leading social network in China.

„Tencent will allow us to play a major role in China, in the e-commerce food sector, we will better use our data, we will better tailor our offering, we will increase traffic to our applications, and we will also organise a transition toward mobile use.  Thanks to WeBank, we will also develop an online system and an innovative credit system as well. Together we will be working on the store of the future as well.  (…) I think this will allow us to lead to a highly innovative model, both offline and online.”

Source: Carrefour