More than two years after its creation, the marketplace for Quebec merchants now finally allows consumers to make purchases online.
Author of the article:
La Presse Canadienne
Stéphane Rolland
More than two years after its creation at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Quebec’s Panier bleu website now finally allows consumers to make purchases online.
The transactional website (lepanierbleu.ca) includes 125 Quebec merchants and 40,000 products. “We’ll add more merchants each week until Christmas to reach 300 to 400 by the end of November,” said Panier bleu general manager Alain Dumas.
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Though the site still describes itself as being in “beta” version, the platform is functional, Dumas said. “We wanted for people to understand that we’re continuing to evolve for the holiday season. … People can make transactions, they can pay, they can create an account. The standard transactions of a store are functional.”
In the medium term, Le Panier bleu wants to continue adding merchants. Dumas said those who want to join starting in January should begin the process now. The objective is to reach about 1,000 merchants by the end of 2023.
The website hopes to learn about consumer behaviour over the holiday period. For example, in-store pickup will be possible at certain merchants. Le Panier bleu will closely monitor interest in that option closer to Christmas, when some consumers worry about not receiving their packages in time, Dumas said.
It’s also possible to filter results by administrative region. As the number of merchants increases, the website could offer more precise geographical filters.
The company behind the website has four minority shareholders: Investissement Québec, Fonds de solidarité FTQ, Desjardins and Lightspeed.
Le Panier bleu could help stores that want to be more competitive online, Dumas said. “I’ll give you an example: We have a merchant who signed up for Le Panier bleu and we noticed that product descriptions were really bad, so it was badly indexed in search engines. We helped them to improve the descriptions. It improved their indexation with Le Panier bleu but also (on other websites).”
To offer products on the Panier bleu website, merchants must have their headquarters in Quebec. Foreign retailers for whom 75 per cent of stores in Quebec are held by local franchisees also have access to the platform.
Items sold via Le Panier bleu must also be warehoused in Quebec when they are sold.
It remains to be seen if consumers will give a second chance to the website. It received mixed reviews because of the absence of a transactional component, which was originally scheduled to be ready by the 2021 holiday season.
Only 14 per cent of Quebecers used Le Panier bleu before it was possible to make purchases through it, according to a survey by NETendances published in March. About 46 per cent of respondents said they would use it when there was a transactional component.
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