“Alongside Japan’s Rakuten, France is one of the only countries in the world where Amazon has a serious competitor,” Cdiscount’s Emmanuel Grenier said in September.

One in three French online shoppers in France is a customer of Cdiscount, which was created in 1998 and initially sold only DVDs and CDs. The total customer base of the company is estimated at 8.6 million, and more and more customers are signing up for Cdiscount’s loyalty programme. The company now commands 8,2% market share. In contrast, its closest competitor in France, Vente-privee, only has 3.8% of the market. Cdiscount is within striking distance of Amazon in terms of monthly visits to its website – the French company can boast 20 million visitors per month, while Amazon has 28 million.

The Casino Group business owned by Jean-Charles Naouri has focused its brand on providing discounted prices for its customers, ranging from Michael Kors, Lacoste, and Gucci to electronics brands like Samsung and Apple. The site boasts 9,000 partner sellers over a wide range of categories, including furniture, baby supplies, sporting goods, electronics, furniture, and toys, for a total of 40 million products available on its site. Amazon has more than 10,000 sellers, but Cdiscount is closing in.

“We are the least expensive in the market,” Grenier said. A subsidiary of Casino Group since February 2000, Cdiscount has come a long way from its CD and DVD years. It began adding to its product line in the early 2000s, focusing on household appliances like washing machines and refrigerators and eventually moving to a broader range of products.

Household appliances remain a major seller for the site, with washing machines and ovens accounting for a third of sales volumes. This focus on home goods helps consolidate Cdiscount’s market share in France: household appliances is one area where the mega American store does not dominate. Cdiscount is also making a remarkable breakthrough in the field of home furnishing.

The company has now extended its offerings into services. It has branched out into insurance, consumer loans, travel, mobile communications, and electricity, and is soon going to offer discounted concert and events tickets. In a hat-tip to Bordeaux, location of the company’s headquarters, Cdiscount also has a cellar of 7,000 wines from which customers may choose. “Everything is discount-able,” Grenier said.

The company isn’t resting on its laurels, however. Though it already has nine mega-storage facilities located throughout France, it plans to increase its storage capacity by one-third as it anticipates continued customer growth.

Though an attempted expansion to Asia and Latin America in 2014 did not fare so well, the company has set its sights once more on markets outside of France, this time aiming to target Belgium, Spain, Italy and Germany in the coming year – which will provide a 200 million-strong customer base to the French business.

The company will also deliver internationally: orders placed in Belgium and Spain are expected to be delivered within 2 days, while orders logged in Germany and Italy can be delivered within three days.

Cdiscount will also be selling its wares on local partner websites, including Real in Germany and ePrice in Italy, which should boost its sales in these new markets. The company will work with ColisExpat for delivery services.

Amazon remains the model to follow, but Cdiscount has done that with aplomb and is reaping the rewards. The company has even borrowed Amazon’s sales-boosting strategies of “Prime Days”, now launching similar promotional days for members of Cdiscount’s loyalty programme.

Cdiscount is also taking another page out of Amazon’s book, following the global behemoth’s lead in setting up brick-and-mortar locations to propel sales. Cdiscount “corners” can be found in many Géant superstores throughout the country, which has the added benefit of helping increase the company’s visibility to new potential customers.

The company is also following Amazon’s lead in creating a similar marketplace where merchants can sell their wares directly via the Cdiscount website, with Cdiscount pocketing commissions from 10% to 12% of sales. This model generated €1.2 billion for the company in 2017 alone.

However, Cdiscount has one particular edge over Amazon: all sellers must provide French-language customer service, while Amazon suppliers are often located internationally and cannot offer help to French-speaking shoppers.

Now, the brand hopes to make its French nationality a competitive advantage over Asian and American competition, both in France and in the four new target markets. Cdiscount’s CEO is confident that the company can be “a serious challenger for Amazon in these four countries,” he said.

The company has a lot of room to grow, Grenier insists. In the next few years, Cdiscount aims to improve and develop a subscription basis, which offers free and unlimited delivery, and also extend grocery partnerships with the Franprix brand. In a way, the brand has been able to get the best of both worlds by drawing on Amazon’s experience, while adapting to the expectations and lifestyle of European consumers.

Wonderbox has come a long way in the past decade. It started off as simply selling tickets to sports events off the Internet – a home-based business founded by Bertile Burel and her partner James Blouzard. Today, the couple employs over 300 workers, sells many different products, both online and in retail shops, for an annual turnover of nearly 200 million euros. With the purchase of one box, clients can offer as gifts anything ranging from hotel stays, or restaurant meals, to wellness and discovery activities – for the consumer to decide. This rapid growth rate, with an annual minimum of 10% since its creation, hinged upon the successful completion of several steps.
 
The first of these steps was changing their vending channel. With sales exclusively online, Wonderbox would have had to spend staggering amounts in advertising to make their offer known on the new market. After lengthy negotiations with the French government, they received authorization to sell hard boxes inside supermarkets – thus greatly increasing their visibility. Because the market was new, their offer would have long remained unknown to the general public, had it stayed purely online. Bertile Burel says « We had to negotiate with the government to be authorized to distribute our products in malls, and specialized or food supermarkets. It became possible once Wonderbox had become a travel agency itself.»
 
Changing their stance on the market also quickly became necessary, to allow the company to grab hold of its own destiny. By simply picking up whichever offer was lying on the market, it was keeping the role of an easy-to-cut-out middleman. To add value and make itself essential within the chain, Wonderbox started involving its suppliers within joint programs (such as hotel plus restaurant). If Wonderbox had simply pre-ordered from its suppliers, it would have killed repeat business, due to customers paying directly the supplier the second time around. And, as an extra risk, Wonderbox was exposed to any other competitor pre-ordering too. By building its own programs and its specific identity, namely quality standards, Wonderbox became central. “To uphold quality upstream and downstream, we have set contract-set quality standards with all of our suppliers. In order to be included within the Wonderbox catalog, partners must meet specific demands, set by our market department.“
 
Innovation, pushing limits and quality are considered central to the brand's DNA, according to founder Bertile Burel, who claims « these core values are posted all over our offices […]. We are constantly innovating, in our offers as well as on our design » which, today, offers 8 different graphic families.
 
After the first stages of development, Bertile Burel and James Blouzard realized they needed to consolidate upstream and downstream. They identified client dissatisfaction and supplier frustration as two ways to cause the business to collapse or slump. They knew word-of-mouth would be their main advertising medium, and any bad experience for a consumer would likely mean ten clients lost behind them. Solid quality thresholds and processes were therefore quickly put into place, with a clever trick: using the workforce as quality inspectors. Employees were given hundreds of euros worth of giftboxes, providing Wonderbox with tons of high-quality feedback and also working as bonuses for staff. Questionnaires were quickly designed and, today, any customer complaint will lead to the supplier being checked out by Wonderbox.
 
The company also knew that they entirely relied on their network of quality partners, none of whom are employees of Wonderbox. This means that partners are free to work for Wonderbox if they wish to, and also to walk away, if they so please. The temptation of making some easy money off supplier's backs through tardy payments was therefore quickly extinguished, to the point that Wonderbox is now the quickest payer on the market. Long payment delays are not uncommon in the distribution business, with middle-men stretching their supplier's treasury beyond comfort. If hotels and restaurants had ended up being fed up with such practices, Wonderbox would have quickly gone out of business, with nothing left to work with. Bertile Burel says « We have cut the payment delays in half. Our goal is not to make cash off our suppliers' backs. »
 
Being first on a market is as much a blessing as it is a hamper. It does mean you have a head start, but it also means you will be making all the mistakes, not learning from the competition's blunders. You get to choose your path and consolidate your position, but you don't benefit your competition's advertising. The wise business decisions which enabled Wonderbox to become the leader in France, and then in neighboring countries, should lead it to be an aggressive player on the new markets it will shortly address, everywhere in the world – as management has not changed, nor has the brand's DNA.