French retailer Darty opens up to 3rd party sellers

Darty, one of the biggest retailers on the French market, has launched a marketplace based on the SAAS technology of Mirakl. With this marketplace, which is open to third party sellers, Darty joins other French retailers like Rue du Commerce and Pixmania.

In terms of sales in France, retailing company Darty comes just after pure player Cdiscount and Amazon. But there is still a wide gap between these first two and Darty, as recently published in LSA Magazine. The launch of a marketplace should help the retailer keeping up with the competition. According to Mirakl, the new platform is part of Darty’s multichannel strategy, “in order to offer a wider choice at a better price no matter the channel requested by the customer.”

Darty focuses on multichannel
Because although the ecommerce sales of Darty in France went up with 10% last year, the company would still like people to come to the store to pick up their online purchases. That’s why Darty started a revamp campaign for all of their French stores. The first redesigned store was visible in the new Paris Beaugrenelle shopping center, that is supposed to receive 12 million visitors per year.

Darty is an online retail company and is headquartered in London. It was founded in 1957 by the Darty family in France, but nowadays it is also active in The Netherlands (BCC.nl), Belgium (Vandenborre.be) and in several Eastern European countries (Datart). Darty has 226 physical stores and more than 11.500 employees in France.

Mirakl was launched in 2011 by Adrien Nussenbaum and Philippe Corrot. It provides a marketplace to some of Europe’s biggest retailers, including department store Galeries Lafayette and retailer Fnac. The first has doubled its online product range as a result, while the latter saw its product range grow from 600,000 to 15 million and marketplace sales to 52 million euros, thanks to the collaboration with the online marketplace technology provider. Mirakl opened offices in London and New York last year and it raised 2.5 million euros worth of investment capital in December 2012.