Success Stories
MarketPlace — A Revolution for Fnac
Client:
Fnac, whose fnac.com is the leading business-to-consumer e-commerce site in France today.Challenge:
- Demonstrate its commitment to being the preferred supplier of technology and consumer products, and innovate to keep pace with rapid developments in buyer behavior.
Solution:
- The MarketPlace, an online trading platform developed with CSC that enables fnac.com to bring its customers together with independent sellers.
Results:
- Fnac now offers a unique combination of ways to access products. After operating for a few weeks, initially with professional sellers, the results surpassed forecasts. MarketPlace is expected, over the long term, to grow to represent 15 percent of revenues of fnac.com.
With the launch of MarketPlace, developed in cooperation with CSC, fnac.com significantly expanded its range of products. Now, the company’s online operations are discovering a new business and a new culture.
The MarketPlace is an online trading platform that enables fnac.com to bring its customers together with independent sellers. The goal is to expand the range of products available on the site, giving consumers greater choice.
This expansion is both quantitative (growing from 1 million active products to 3 million) and qualitative, with the arrival of new products (imports, for example), secondhand products and new product categories (posters, collectibles, musical instruments and others).
New business, new culture
“The MarketPlace will enable us to respond fully to the diversity of our customers’ expectations in the cultural products segment,” explains Xavier Flamand, general manager of fnac.com. “This is a rebirth for fnac.com since the MarketPlace is at the same time a cultural change – the unleashing of internal competition – and a change of business as we take on this new role of intermediary,” says Flamand.
CSC: A long-standing partner
For assistance in implementing the MarketPlace project, fnac.com once again called upon CSC, a trusted partner with a track record of cooperation with the company. CSC had previously helped fnac.com with the redesign of its content management system and the migration of its infrastructure. Leading the design team, CSC’s task was to translate the strategic choices made into robust and efficient systems architecture, and then to coordinate an ambitious project with tight deadlines. Work started in November 2008, aiming for go-live in May 2009.
“The challenge was to define the vast functional scope, and then to manage all the development operations in parallel,” says Joseph Tempier, head of the project at CSC.
Dynamics of a successful project
The MarketPlace opened on schedule on May 27, 2009. After operating for a few weeks, initially with professional sellers, the results surpassed the forecasts. With the MarketPlace, which should over the long term grow to represent 15 percent of revenues of fnac.com, Fnac now offers a unique combination of ways to access products (new, secondhand, downloaded, ordered online or purchased in the bricks-and-mortar store).
This new technical infrastructure will allow the company to develop innovative processes to respond to the continuously evolving cultural needs of its customers.
For More Information
Learn about our Consumer Goods & Services solutions.
Read about how we helped Fnac reinvent its music downloads.
Download the full article in CSC Premium Magazine (PDF).