Press

Black Friday has become a major event in the e-commerce industry, and Cdiscount ranks as France’s leading Black Friday e-tailer after reporting €43 million in business volumes, or five times the amount recorded on a typical day. A total of 8 million people – i.e., one in three households – visited the Cdiscount website last Friday.

This year’s sales event confirmed that Black Friday is the kick-off point for the Christmas shopping season, with toys and games comprising the bulk of items sold. Nearly 10,000 PS4 consoles and 200,000 toys/video games were purchased during the day, including hoverboards, which this year once again proved to be a stand-out item: 1,500 were sold within a few minutes after the stroke of midnight.

Customers’ enthusiasm for Black Friday was particularly visible on social media, demonstrating that French consumers have really embraced the major shopping bonanza. Cdiscount was by a very wide margin the top retailer on social media, counting some 223,000 interactions with its customers* on Friday, 24 November alone.

We are pleased to announce the signing of an agreement between Ocado Group plc (“Ocado”) and Groupe Casino, to develop the Ocado Smart Platform (“OSP”) in France.

Ocado is the world’s leading dedicated on-line grocery retailer with a strong technological advantage. The scalable, modular end-to-end solution provided by the OSP is a unique answer to the opportunities and challenges posed by shifting offline/online trends in grocery.

This highly innovative and effective commercial formula will be achieved through access to Ocado’s end-to-end solution, including the construction of its latest generation, state-of-the-art automated warehouse (for which Ocado will invest to install its grid and its robots), Ocado’s best-in-class front-end web site functionality, last-mile routing management and big data, real time implementation.

Groupe Casino’s banners will benefit from this innovative grocery e-commerce platform, firstly Monoprix.fr, which will provide its customers with the largest assortment of food items at the best levels of services and costs.

The agreement sets out plans for the immediate initiation of the development of a Customer Fulfilment Centre (“CFC”) using Ocado’s proprietary Mechanical Handling Equipment (“MHE”) to serve the Greater Paris area, the Normandie and Hauts de France Regions.The build and launch is expected to take at least two years.

In consideration of the investments made by Ocado, of maintenance and of provision of technology, Groupe Casino will pay Ocado certain upfront fees upon signing,and during the development phase, then ongoing fees linked to its utilisation of capacity within the CFC and service criteria.

In addition to the initial CFC, Groupe Casino and Ocado will consider further development of other CFCs close to other large urban areas.

“Groupe Casino is pleased to announce the agreement with Ocado Group which will allow it to develop an integrated customer and logistics platform, considered the best in the market.