Monthly shopping for groceries and household appliances supposed to be fun, but not in Jakarta where the only thing that’s consistent is the traffic jam. Going places in Jakarta can be a nightmare for most people, which is probably why Jakarta is the perfect place for e-commerce companies to grow.
Carrefour, an international hypermarket chain headquartered in Boulogne Billancourt, France, is one of the largest hypermarket chains in the world over than with 1,500 hypermarkets all over the world. We recently learned that they have launched their online shopping platform for its Indonesian store. Currently, the e-commerce site only operates the Lebak Bulus store but it will continue to expand its reach in Jakarta and maybe other cities in Indonesia.
We talked to Adrien Barthel, Carrefour Indonesia’s marketing manager. “In 2011, we came up with a new version of our website displaying the catalogues and the promotion, and we also became one of the top players among the social media activity. The final step was to bridge our online audience to our main activity, by providing the online shopping experience to our customers” he said to us via email.
So, I decided to try the e-commerce service and buy pastries, just in case I need them to go through the holidays. The website is very simple, it’s not all fancy and pretty, but the site works and understandable in a very easy way. Of course the site would be familiar for those with experience in web online shopping, although it’s not hard for laggards to learn how the site works. I spend some time browsing and navigate through the site and buy a few things here and there. Was fun!
Currently, Carrefour only supports payments using credit cards which makes total sense if we’re looking at the fact that their offline customers uses credit cards a lot, often just to get discounts and promotions. Carrefour cleverly use this behaviour in order to push the payment admin operations to a minimum and simply use a credit card payment gateway. To be honest, I don’t see any reassuring badge of security for my transaction, which probably should be a priority in order to gain trust from customer.
Carrefour is also fortunate that its brand already associated with good quality items and products, this should minimise customers’ doubts and distrusts that they usually have with other e-commerce sites. And Carrefour knows exactly where their strengths are, but this also means they have to maintain customers’ trust and that is even harder than earning them in the first place.
In short, Carrefour’s online shopping site is generally easy to use and very simple, but that’s only 30% of the job done. The hardest part of e-commerce is the logistics, until the groceries landed safely in the customer’s house, the job is far from done. This is probably the one and only pain point of Carrefour’s e-commerce site, they don’t do delivery. According to Barthel, this concept of shop online and pick up on the store works well in other countries so they figure out that this will work in Indonesia as well.
One thing for sure, if Carrefour’s system works (online and offline backend) this can change the way people do their monthly shopping. And on the way there, changed people’s perspective about shopping online and MAYBE, just maybe, help grow the other smaller e-commere sites as well.
Barthel said that they are launching this eCommerce concept (Click & Drive – Buy online & Pick up at the store) at Lebak Bulus store as a beta version of what they call Carrefour Online. “The idea is to work on the concept, to improve the quality of service and in a near future to bring this new service wherever it’s needed”, Barthel added.
