I've had a lot of involvement with this channel over the last six months or so. Within my organisation I will admit that this channel is something we've set up as an additional channel of income rather than a main sales channel. We utilise Volo Commerce, a multi channel sales and inventory management software and the new integration that is hopefully coming in the next few months will mean that we will get a few more sales each month to run alongside eBay and Amazon for us. We set up the cDiscount account for manual management, which I have headed, to see how the channel performed and whether we wanted to go ahead with Volo integration which we shall be doing.
I can give you an insight on how well the channel has done for us; I can't remember the start up date exactly, but lets say since January we've had 485 sales. Out of those we have only had a small handful of customers complain about a 6 to 8 working day delivery period from UK to France. In that time however, we've had only 7 customer feedback. So don't expect massive recognition of your services
I will say that out of 90 or so listed products only a handful seem to sell well, so it's definitely an interesting marketplace. As someone previously said, the lower prices do seem to sell well, but there are occasions that do buck that trend. Off of the top of my, head our main sellers have been Bestway Pool Filters, a Ninja Turtles back pack, a wall mounted extendible clothes line, a massaging ball, and a few different Monster High dolls and playsets.
In terms of inventory, I find that their listing system is easy enough to use once you have gotten the hang of what everything is and where everything goes. With any new sales channel there is a period of learning required, so this isn't really any different for cDiscount. When we were setting up, we received a fair amount of help from an account manager with documentation and other bits and pieces to get us going. One tip I will give you is that at the top right corner of any of the cDiscount back end pages, you will see a union jack and a French flag. I highly recommend changing the language to English using the union jack, it makes things a lot easier.
I have noticed that this is a fairly old OP, and I am very well aware that cDiscount has made considerable changes to their back office. It's entirely possible that problems anyone may have come across previously may actually have now been corrected or made easier to get around.
One draw back I will say is the customer service. I've never used the channel for purchasing, I can't as I am unable to register as a customer as an English consumer, but I have always received a response from cDiscount helpdesk whenever an email has been sent. But the issue with both the cDiscount helpdesk and actually answering customer queries from your own shop is the language barrier. Anyone who has ever tried translating French on Google Translate will know exactly what I mean. Translating from English to French is fine. Type it out, click a button and you've translated. But if you then re-translate that back to English, you will see that it is sometimes just a complete jumbled mess of what you wanted to say. The same is true when translating a customers message into English. But this can hardly be blamed on cDiscount as this is the same situation if you sell through Amazon Unified France. But, even this can be gotten around with the use of some email templates that are generic with a few pieces of information that you switch out for each individual customer.
All in all I will say that cDiscount is a channel that UK sellers might want to consider a secondary, extra income channel rather than a main sales channel. French sellers a lot of the time will be able to go cheaper because they have cheaper postage than we do from the UK. But if you get some of your own unique products on there or you can get products that are on there with few other sellers it can be a good channel to have. As always, there is no generic answer. Only you guys are going to know your circumstances and whether the channel is right for you. However, even through the faults it has and the annoyances, I would recommend the cDiscount channel. Europe is becoming a massive new marketplace opening up to UK sellers, and at Urban Trading we are looking to start exploiting this. cDiscount was the first in a few opportunities we are exploring, including the Polish channel Allegro.
Thank you for taking the time to read through, and I do apologise for the length of the post. Hopefully I have helped some of you make your mind up, one way or the other, on whether the channel is for you. If there are any other bits and pieces that anyone would like to know, let's get the questions coming in and I'm sure that myself along with other cDiscount users on the forum can try and get those answered for you
