Carrefour in China
The days of the hypermarket are getting worse.
Consumers, especially young consumers, prefer to purchase the required products in convenience stores and online shopping channels. At the same time, offline shoppers pay more attention to a pleasant shopping experience and promotions. Compared to physical stores, the relatively low prices of online shopping channels, convenient price comparison methods, and the ability to provide home delivery services are the main motivations that drive consumers to choose online shopping.
Public information shows that Carrefour China is also shrinking its stores and has closed some stores in cities such as Kunshan, Hefei, Shaoxing, and Hangzhou. According to relevant statistics, there were more than 15 Carrefour stores in Huaguan in 2015, and the first half of this year Carrefour closed three more stores in China.
Under heavy pressure, Carrefour’s transformation seems imperative.
In Carrefour ’s vision, its O2O business will integrate rich offline product lines and store resources, relying on offline stores to provide consumers with store delivery, mobile payment, app applications, and store return services.
But the reality is:
No matter how beautiful and developed the online platform is, the functions are perfect. Without traffic, it is equivalent to opening a physical store in the old forest in the mountains. Many companies tend to divert from physical stores to self-built platforms, and registered users grow rapidly, but the actual operation cannot be achieved, and the problem is that they do not control the traffic entrance. The e-commerce giants have tightly controlled this and will not give newcomers a chance. You pay a lot of money for users to install your app, which is often easily deleted by the user, or even if the user does not delete it, it is left behind. “
On the other hand, logistics, as one of the most critical elements of O2O business, also determines the stickiness and repurchase rate of users to a certain extent. According to reports, in Beijing, Carrefour chose a professional third-party cold chain logistics company-Vientiane Logistics. At this stage, users in the Beijing area can deliver the next day as soon as possible after ordering, and room temperature products that are ordered after 5pm can only be delivered the next day. This delivery time does not have an advantage in various home-to-home businesses that are fully blooming, such as speed and one hour.
Although they did a lot methods to improve their business, but eventually failed in logistics integration, leading to 19 years of withdrawal from China.
The blog of Logistics at MGEPS at UPV 