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How the retail giant rebuilt its online grocery business in six months.
Carrefour replaced hundreds of disconnected digital projects with one e-commerce business that helped customers shop faster.
“projects” consolidated into agile squads
months to release MVP
conversion rate since launch
As one of the largest hypermarket chains in the world, Carrefour has spent decades making everyday shopping accessible to millions of customers. But as grocery shopping has moved online, that same promise had to extend beyond the physical store. Customers expected to shop on their terms, without sacrificing the range, value or convenience they associated with Carrefour. The retailer saw an opportunity to make online grocery shopping a stronger part of its business and build a digital experience worthy of its scale.
Grocery retail in France is facing seismic shifts: French shoppers are going to the traditional hypermarkets less and less; the shift toward healthy, locally sourced food has become mainstream; and online grocery is accelerating but highly competitive.
Carrefour had great assets: a strong brand, an unparalleled mix of store formats and a loyal customer base. Yet their online assets didn’t play well together, mirroring organizational complexity with a tendency to become silos. Their digital footprint was fragmented and change didn’t always scale to make a significant impact.
Carrefour’s CEO announced a €5 billion turnover target for ecommerce over five years (20 percent of overall sales) and a key partnership with Publicis Sapient to drive digital business transformation.
Publicis Sapient worked with Carrefour to quickly build a new e-commerce platform. Our goal was to enable Carrefour to behave like an enterprise startup. We began by shaping a strategy to create a cohesive, common digital vision. We consolidated more than 350 separate digital projects into a unified, shared foundation to drive e-commerce growth, supporting their food transition strategy and building the foundation for the future—mobile, voice and personalization at scale. We did this by introducing a new scaled delivery model and breaking silos through integrated, diverse agile teams. Instead of coordinating large, infrequent releases across disconnected systems, teams could make changes more often and respond faster to customer needs. Major releases could now happen more frequently without taking the site offline.
After only six months, the first version of their new e-commerce platform was live. A year later, the strategy had proven successful. The unified digital assets are driving massive e-commerce traffic, customer satisfaction is at its highest and their conversion rate has registered steady growth. But more importantly, the pace of change has massively accelerated with the capacity to deliver enhancements every day without downtime. Today, customer-centric, evidence based incremental transformation is a norm at Carrefour. The teams measure, iterate and swiftly react to customer feedback and behavior.
Julian Skelly
Head of Retail, EMEA + APAC
