Carrefour Belgium has announced that it is launching a new online sales platform for local products.
The announcement makes Carrefour the first major retailer in Belgium to open up its online sales platform to local producers in order for them to access a new demographic.
Shoppers simply shop as before via the retailer's 'Carrefour Drive' service, and after choosing a store at which they want to do their shopping, they can access local products.
When customers are purchasing online, they will have access to products that are sourced from within a 40 km radius of the selected store, the company said.
Increased Presence
This new initiative will enable Carrefour to improve its connections with the 750 local producers that are already supplying its stores with some 11,000 products
For producers too, the integration should be frictionless, as Carrefour says that it has worked on adapting its billing and payment services to make them easier to use by smaller producers.
Carrefour has trialled the service at one hypermarket in the south east of Belgium, near Luxembourg, and npw plans to extend this opportunity to all of its stores which already have an in-store local product offering.
Carrefour has not announced plans to extend this new initiatives to several others of its markets, in France or Spain for example. The company has reiterated that it wants to be the leading food e-commerce retailer, as originally stated in its Carrefour 2022 plan.
© 2018 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Matthieu Chassain. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
