Features

Positioning Fnac.com as the Leading Web Merchant in France

2010 Chairman's Award for Excellence Recipient

French retail giant Fnac faced economic and market pressure to have a stronger online presence. It wanted its online shoppers to benefit from what was best in its brick-and-mortar stores: sales expertise and customer service.

In 2007, Fnac turned to CSC to help design and implement an Internet transformation program. We had already helped them build and launch their online music distribution service on Fnac.com in 2004. Now, the transformation program would align capabilities between Fnac’s 149 stores and Fnac.com. After three years, the program has positioned Fnac.com as the leading Web merchant in France in terms of traffic. Our team consisted of Laurent Atlani, Joseph Tempier, Ali Haghipour and Frédéric Bouin.

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The transformation program had three thrusts: a new business model based on an online marketplace strategy, the switch from being product- to customer-oriented, and international deployment.

Fnac was the first non-pure-Web company to open an online marketplace for third-party sellers. Today some 6,500 sellers offer some 2.4 million products on Fnac.com’s MarketPlace, which was launched in May 2009. People can make purchases from the Web, a store or their mobile device.

Fnac is harnessing the customer information captured via the Web to customize offers, promotions and recommendations on Fnac.com as well as enrich the customer’s in-store experience. To this end, “My Fnac” was launched in October 2008 to give customers a personalized experience and to enable the company to define customer segments and create targeted offerings.

An international platform was created from the French solution and rolled out to Italy, Spain and Portugal, with plans for rollouts in Brazil, Belgium, Greece, and Switzerland. The core system had to be designed to plug rapidly into any local logistics back-office system. Italy and Spain are reporting strong improvements in sales and order handling.