This text is taken from Courrier de l’économie. Click here to subscribe.
After having suffered numerous criticisms as to its usefulness, the Le Panier bleu website, created during the pandemic to showcase Quebec merchants, finally became transactional in October 2022. Its first months of existence have positioned it , according to the initial wishes, as an alternative to Amazon? The NETendances 2022 report from the Digital Transformation Academy, published last Wednesday, offers some possible answers.
Questioned by a Web survey, 1025 adult Internet users in Quebec were asked to estimate their electronic consumption in 2022. Those who shopped online indicated on average that they used Le Panier bleu for 7% of their volume of purchases. Given the strategic timing of the opening of the transactional platform, the majority of consumers say they have used it to find Christmas gifts.
It seems that the Quebec platform has stolen some market share from Amazon, as well as other foreign and Canadian merchants. Sales would have remained stable at other Quebec merchants.
The general manager of Le Panier bleu, Alain Dumas, said he was encouraged by the fact that the market shares won do not seem to come from other Quebec businesses. “It is important for us to boost the local offer, and not to cannibalize it”, he indicated to the Duty.
According to Mr. Dumas, the holiday season was satisfactory, since transactions and orders would generally have been processed according to expectations. However, Le Panier bleu does not disclose its sales data.
The company aims to continue its growth, particularly that of its product offering. At the beginning of January, its catalog consisted of 67,000 different items sold by 211 Quebec businesses. Today, there are 329 merchants, for a total of approximately 114,100 products. “We would like to ensure that a consumer who is committed to buying local finds what he is looking for by coming to the Blue Basket,” said Mr. Dumas.
Changes made this winter allow the Blue Basket system to be well synchronized with merchants’ online stores, which accelerates the number of participants they can integrate into the platform, says Mr. Dumas. Monthly fees are now requested from them, in addition to the commission charged on the sale of the products.
Still far from profitability
Remember that Le Panier bleu, created by the Government of Quebec as a non-profit organization, is now the property of a private company owned by Investissement Québec, the Mouvement Desjardins, the Fonds de solidarité FTQ and Lightspeed. Mr. Dumas estimates that the platform will not be profitable for at least three years.
The big project for 2023 is the development of logistics allowing consumers to receive their orders more quickly and at a lower cost. Basically, the idea is that delivery is no longer solely the responsibility of each merchant. Among the solutions in sight: allowing merchants to keep stocks directly in the distribution centers of logistics companies, to assemble multi-merchant orders in order to reduce delivery costs and to negotiate collective rates with carriers.