The Internet is incredibly appealing because of the choice that it offers. Fnac.com is the website with the highest BtoC audience ratings with 600,000 single visitors per month and over 2 million active customers¹. On Redcats Group websites, we are seeing an increasing number of Internet-exclusive products. “Fashion focus” collections are renewed every 7 or 15 days, to satisfy customers’ needs. Some examples are the “minute mode” on laredoute.fr or the “pronto moda” on ellos.se. Fnac.com invested in major development of its digital service and product offer in 2006. Its catalogue includes over one million music tracks to download on Fnacmusic, along with games, software and videos on demand. Recently, the site successfully launched an offer of unlimited streaming (which lets you listen to music without downloading the file). For € 9.99 per month, you can access more than 1 million songs and 90,000 albums.

The Internet also pulls customers in with its prices. Conforama sends one e-mail per week to its newsletter’s 400,000 subscribers to present its “top products” or to inform Internet users of new sales brochures. Fnac.com takes on discounters at their own game, by offering their members reductions of up to 20%, or short sales periods with countdown sales of limited editions twice a week.

 

Because Internet is a see-now, buy-now showcase, it also ups the ante in terms of service quality. Websurfers don’t have time to wait. They are very demanding. If they don’t find what they are looking for, they simply look somewhere else. To help websurfers find the fashion or home decoration products of their dreams at just the right price, shopoon.fr, a shopping search engine, guides them through the forty or so partner companies. Conforama.fr is France’s leading “home and garden” e-commerce site. It boasted 2.9 million single visitors in the last quarter of 2006², placing it in front of Ikea, Castorama and Leroy Merlin. Conforama.fr offers a wide array of services. It checks the availability of products in all shops in real time, allows customers to purchase items online and collect them at the shop or have them delivered to their home, advises customers in the creation of their kitchens, using a configurator³, and more. Not to mention “Confo Déménagement”. This practical mini-website provides services and advice to websurfers who are moving, from 1-euro car rentals to a full to-do list. La redoute.fr, France’s leading clothing website and France’s third most consulted BtoC site after Amazon and Sncf, goes to great lengths to ensure that its customers have a real shopping experience. Customers can browse through clothing, choose and buy with the utmost ease and comfort. These qualities also sum up the expectations of the 25 million single visitors to Redcats Group websites worldwide.

This service approach is also a focus of the “click and mortar” feature on the Fnac site. This allows websurfers to reserve a product on the Fnac.com website and then pick it up in a Fnac store, where they can receive the advice of the sales team. And, as if this wasn’t enough, in the case that the customer cannot find a product in the store, the salesperson advises the customer to order it from the website and have it delivered to his home.

 

Conforama plans to use video to highlight the advantages of the Saveo after-sales service. Video can also be used to illustrate the quality of the kitchens and various home decoration possibilities. Redcats Group aims to concentrate on what it does best – fashion and interior design – by becoming the irrefutable specialist in its leading categories and offering more fashionable products, advice and editorial content. This goal also applies to community sites launched in 2006, such as planetvertbaudet.fr, a site for parents and future parents, and onestoplus.com, a site dedicated to plus sizes in the United States. Fnac is set to unveil its new website in the second half of the year. It features a new interface and new community functions.

At the same time, content is becoming more digital and less material. Each day, more songs are available in MP3 format to facilitate the interoperability of files (the possibility of reading the same file on different media). Moreover, people themselves are becoming increasingly mobile. In response to their new needs, music from sites like Fnac will soon be accessible from their mobile phones. The Fnac website has the highest audience rating of French B2C sites. These stellar results are leading Fnac managers to consider making a profit from this high flow of traffic via advertising and partnerships.

 

¹ On Fnac.com, a customer is considered active if he has made a purchase during the last 12 months.

² According to Nielsen Net Ratings. Measured during the last quarter of 2006 (September, October, November).

³ Launched less than one year ago, Conforama’s mini-site dedicated to kitchens receives 50,000 visitors every month.