Carrefour Wants To Open Convenience Stores In China So Fiercely.

20 years after entering China, Carrefour, France's largest retailer, is consolidating its position in this competitive market by developing new formats.

In November last year, Carrefour opened the first convenience store called "Easy Carrefour" in Shanghai. Third days ago, in September 20th, fourth stores were opened in Shanghai, Shanghai.

"We plan to open about 10 stores by the end of next spring festival, and if we do well in the future, we will consider opening cities outside Shanghai."

Carrefour business and convenience store business director Oliver Tollet told the interface reporter.

With the development of new convenience stores, Carrefour officially launched Carrefour online shopping mall in Shanghai in June 18th this year.

At Easy convenience stores, there are computers connecting Carrefour online shopping mall.

As more and more convenience stores open, Carrefour hopes to get through the online shopping order + hypermarket delivery + convenience store's O2O shopping mode.

However, Carrefour also found that since its opening up, there are not many consumers who choose to offer services.

In Carrefour's view, in the past, other brands of convenience stores were offline, but there might be a wrong store. Although the Easy convenience store would not have such a situation, it might be better for direct door-to-door delivery because of labor saving and convenience.

This is a new model Carrefour is exploring, and how to solve the problems remains to be seen.

At present, convenience stores are indeed the most favored form of retail business, but in Shanghai, there were more than 4800 convenience stores in 2013, the most densely populated cities in mainland convenience stores.

Therefore, consumers no longer need a new convenience store brand. "We want to open a bigger store and provide more products."

Oliver Tollet said.

Oliver Tollet calls the Easy convenience store "convenience supermarket". The most intuitive difference between it and ordinary convenience stores is that the operating area standard of each Easy convenience store is around 250 square meters, which is equivalent to three ordinary convenience stores, offering 4000-5000 kinds of goods, far more than ordinary convenience stores.

Carrefour wants to create an atmosphere of lifestyle for Easy convenience stores. So in these shops with orange red as its keynote, there are free Wi-Fi, WeChat scanning and photo printing machines, simple coffee bars, and simple drinks such as American coffee, iron, milk tea and so on. The price is usually around 10 yuan, and there are quite a lot of charging power on the table near the street windows.

In the biggest shop of Chaling North Road, Easy convenience store, because there are enough venues, Carrefour chooses to make a simple coffee bar on the two floor. There are several desks and chairs that can bring food from the first floor supermarket to eat.

This coffee bar did attract some consumers. After a rainy evening, the pupils in school near school wore their school uniforms, carried the instant bubble noodles and milk tea to the two floor, while eating, while writing homework, waiting for the rain to stop outside.

Using the convenience of the site, Easy convenience store and O2O's manicure serve Shanghe's beaver family, and do some nail service in the store.

In addition, the store plans to use the two floor space regularly to hold young white collar oil painting salons.

"These are popular among young white-collar women, such as single young women who may not want strangers to come to their homes, and are safe and convenient in convenience stores near their homes."

Oliver Tollet explains that these simple value-added services can help attract more consumers, and also reflect the characteristics of Easy convenience stores.

In fact, as early as 2004, Carrefour introduced the brand of fresh supermarket.

"Trying to explore the convenience store format, but finally due to the limited scale and high cost, the Chinese market was withdrawn the following year.

However, "as China's consumer demand changes, China is producing new consumption patterns, and consumers want to see changes. We hope to adapt to this change and provide consumers with more choices."

Oliver Tollet indicates.

To facilitate the development of convenience stores in China, Carrefour set up an independent team called the new format project department a year and a half ago. However, as the business started, there were only a few people in the Department, mainly relying on other mature resources of Carrefour.

Prior to the opening of the store, Carrefour made a survey of the Chinese market, and eventually found that the market saturated Shanghai had more convenient supermarkets than ordinary convenience stores, because it was more flexible than the hypermarket and could provide more options than convenience stores. It could avoid full competition with ordinary convenience stores and fill the market space outside the hypermarket.

And larger venues are also convenient for providing value-added services, reflecting brand characteristics and increasing consumer stickiness.

Easy convenience store decoration finally chose orange as the dominant color. This is also because in the preliminary investigation, this is the most favorite color selected by consumers.

In the site selection, Carrefour, based on the results of the previous survey, was selected in the traffic arteries and office building areas, where the main target consumers were the residents living nearby and the commuters passing by.

However, Oliver Tollet also said that it is still in the testing stage, and will open shop in different types of stores in the future, and explore more to sum up experience.

In the preliminary preparation process,

It is also found that unlike customers in hypermarkets, the convenience store customers are sensitive to time and need more convenient and efficient services. At the same time, customers' needs are different at different times of the day.

"For example, breakfast is needed for work in the morning and lunch boxes for lunch at noon."

Oliver Tollet said, "after investigation, we found that

Foreigners pay more attention to convenience food, especially ready to eat food, so we increase the proportion of food in the shop, besides the simple meals such as lunch and breakfast, and cooking ingredients that can be brought home at night.

This is also the biggest difference between our convenience supermarkets and hypermarkets, which is to provide ready to eat food.

In November 2014, the first "Easy Carrefour" convenience store was finally opened.

After the opening of the business, Carrefour quickly received feedback, and many customers expressed their desire to add fresh products.

Previously, due to factors such as logistics costs, and because the first store was relatively conservative, Carrefour had no fresh products, but consumer feedback showed them the market for fresh products, decided to join the category in the following stores, and together with all ready to eat foods and imported foods became the selling points of Easy convenience store's external marketing.

"Our supply chain and Carrefour stores are shared and relatively flexible."

Oliver Tollet indicates.