Cdiscount launches subsidiary Octopia, expects to double in size in 4 to 5 years

Foreign media reported that Cdiscount revealed the name of the sub-design market officially launched on April 1st - Octopia.

Octopia has been informally in use since January 2021. As an e-commerce platform combined with logistics services, it says: "We provide libraries, books to fill them, and logistics to deliver them." It seems that Octopia's goal is simple but ambitious: it provides merchants with the possibility of accelerating their online sales activities by providing technical support, inventory management and order delivery, allowing consumers to access products and sellers in the pure player market at the same time.

The Octopia service can therefore significantly increase the influence of online sellers, who, implicitly, offer a fairly new transaction offer that allows these brands, in addition to assisting in the design of the marketplace, to provide logistics services to their third-party sellers through Cdiscount's CLogistics. In terms of remuneration, unlike the marketplace commission, the structure adopts a pass-through margin for these products.

The offer is planned to be deployed internationally, mainly in Europe, Africa and the Middle East: "We already have millions of active customers in France, but there is still a large portion of them to be won. In a completely open world, I believe that we must find customers wherever we are, sell more products, increase both our market power and the sales potential of our suppliers and sellers, and therefore our profitability."

Emmanuel Grenier estimates its market potential at 600 billion euros. This could also be a sign that Cdiscount is positioning itself in a growing market, or in particular in Mirakl, which has launched a marketplace for distributors such as Carrefour, Leroy Merlin and even Maisons du Monde and, more recently, Greenweez. The Casino Group’s offering includes the last important asset, access to the catalog and sellers of the Cdiscount marketplace, that is, 13,000 French and international sellers offering another 100 million products to potential customers.

All this with a completely redesigned business model that should allow it to double in size within four to five years. “ My goal is that this new activity becomes as important as Cdiscount in four to five years , with 4.5 billion in business and becomes our third most profitable pillar after marketplaces and digital marketing ” , said Cdiscount’s CEO .

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