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Decathlon to open online marketplace featuring other brands

Illustration picture shows someone ordering a snorkelling mask on a website of sport supermarket Decathlon (BELGA PHOTO JASPER JACOBS)
10:32 28/10/2020

Sports and leisure company Decathlon has decided to launch its own online marketplace in Belgium where it will sell its flagship products and brands, but where it will also invite other brands and other merchants to market their products. Decathlon hopes the marketplace will help to increase online shopping traffic by up to five times its current rate when it opens next month.

Decathlon is hugely successful with its own brands, marketing 86 in total, but it also sells big names like Adidas or Nike for example, in its stores and online. The coronavirus pandemic has boosted online sales with Decathlon recording up to 12,000 orders per day in France during lockdown. But competition on the internet is tough. Sometimes potential customers don't necessarily find what they’re looking for. The customer then starts looking at competing sites, such as Amazon, eBay or specialised sites such as Trakks.

By opening up its site to other brands or companies that have complementary or even competing products, Decathlon believes it will enhance one of the most important areas of its business: the relationship with the customer.

Despite providing competitors with more exposure to its own customer base, Decathlon believes it will reap the benefits through customer satisfaction with its site, and the potential growth of a customer base which will now come looking for a wider range of products and will perhaps find what they need from Decathlon’s own ranges.

In addition, Decathlon will collect a wider range of data which will be a major asset for the company's future business plans; this will include data on what the customer buys, how much they pay, what products they viewed surfed, what did they linger on, etc.

The marketplace goes live in mid-November, initially only in Belgium but with a view to rolling out the offering in other countries based on the results of the Belgian experiment.

Written by Nick Amies

Comments

pratap05@gmail.com

Bold move. That shows the confidence of the companies management on their processes and abilities.

Oct 31, 2020 07:15