CDON launches Nelly.com in Belgium

CDON has announced the local version of Nelly.com in Belgium. The online fashion store was already active in the Northern European country, but that was only through an EU-site in English. Now Belgian consumers are served through a dual language site which is adapted for the local market.

The Swedish CDON Group calls the launch in Belgium “in line with the company’s strategy”. According to Paul Fischbein, president and CEO of the company, the launch of Nelly.com in Belgium is a natural step after the launches in the Netherlands and France. We couldn’t agree more. If you’ve already put effort in a Dutch website and a French website, a Belgian website isn’t much more of a hassle, as the country is divided in two groups: the Dutch speaking Flemish people and the French speaking Walloons.

“We believe that Nelly.com, with its strong and unique offering will appeal to the Belgian target audience. In line with previous launches on new markets, the launch in Belgium will initially be carried out on a small scale with limited marketing activities.” That last note is spot-on, as we barely saw this news covered on several (European) news sites. It almost looks like CDON doesn’t want Nelly.com to be a success in Belgium…

Nelly.com’s start in the Netherlands wasn’t very smooth
As Dutch bloggers we have experienced the launch of Nelly.com in the Netherlands. That was also a relatively quiet launch and after a few months there still wasn’t that much marketing activity coming from CDON Group. The launch in the Netherlands also wasn’t a very smooth one, as we found some errors you wouldn’t expect on such an online store. For example, it wasn’t clear which courier company would deliver the packages, the site was full of linguistic errors and Dutch customers couldn’t pay with their most preferred payment method, iDeal.

Nelly.com is the largest online fashion and beauty store for people between the age of 18 and 35 in the Nordics. It started with a local ecommerce store in Sweden in 2003 and after five years local version were launched in the other Nordic countries Norway, Denmark and Finland. Soon Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium followed. There’s also an EU-site in English and Nelly.com also offers a global version of its site since last year.