Carrefour has launched a new website, carrefour-beaute.com, to sell personal care products.
Carrefour’s online personal care venture will sell over 5000 cosmetics, beauty and personal hygiene products through the site. In the next six months the retailer also plans to launch cultural and electronic websites, with the intention of making Carrefour a favorite portal for female consumers in France.
This is not the first move by a major groceries retailer to exploit the online beauty market. Tesco, for instance, has a joint venture with iVillage and hopes to bring the website’s US success to the UK. In the US the site has some 10 million users logging on per month. In the UK Tesco provides the retailing arm for the venture. Since its difficulties in the US with BabyGear.com, iVillage wants to steer clear of retailing.
But can Carrefour – and Tesco – be successful where so many of the online beauty pure-plays have apparently failed? Carrefour has decided to ‘go it alone’, using its own name to roll out its personal care eCommerce site. Carrefour is a powerful brand, but lacks experience in creating online portals to which carrefour-beaute.com aspires. Further, the site may also be constrained by Carrefour’s overall control, limiting its ability to act as an independent industry portal as it will need to fit the firm’s positioning and image.
Tesco, by contrast, has sought a joint venture with an existing online portal player. This seems to be a more sensible strategy. Tesco will benefit from iVillage’s expertise and existing infrastructure, giving a flexibility advantage over a wholly retailer-owned site and a more credible position as a beauty portal. Moreover, the risk is spread over two companies that are benefiting from each other’s expertise, whereas Carrefour is taking all the risks in its operation.
The collapse of pure-play operators like beautyjungle.com indicates that companies with an offline offering are in the ascendancy. Carrefour has everything to play for, but may not have chosen the best model on which to base its beauty portal. Tesco, meanwhile, has seemingly got the basics right.
