Q&A
Q: @Alban Curral: Right to withdraw within 14 days, also for reservations of holiday rental and when does these 14days start? After the 1st payment?
A: The right of withdrawal provided by the French Consumer Code does not apply to holiday rental. The consumer has a period of fourteen calendar days to exercise his/her right of withdrawal, without having to give any reason or incur any penalties. The period shall run from the date of receipt of the product.
Q: @Cedric, webshop met Magento, Mirakl of eigen ontwikkeling ?
A: We have a custom-built solution
Q: @Barbara, what online payment options are popular in France?
A: “Carte Bancaire” (bank cards: the most common being Visa and Mastercard). Amex is now bigger and bigger since they reduced their fees on January 2020. Paypal is a plus.
Q: @Barbara when selling through our website there are very high costs for payments at sellers side. (o.a. credit card) how are you cooping with this?
A: We work with an intermediary payments platform
Q: @Cedric: how do you approach building the brand awareness in the french market
A: As we are only an ecommerce platform in France, our customers are online buyers and we focus on digital marketing channels to reach them.
Q: @Barbara: how do you deal with shipping costs (and the differences per regions?)
A: We ship from our warehouse in the Netherlands and work with local and international partners with who we agreed nation-wide shipping fees.
Q: @Barbara What amount was allocated to this new project to launch French online business? and with how many people involved intern / extern?
A: We’ve developed this project mainly inhouse with an Ecommerce team of about 140 people, directly or indirectly, involved. We had external legal and tax advise.
Q: @Barbara/Cedric: We want to sell a product B2C in France which is very large and heavy weighted (40 kg) so we struggle with finding the right transporter. In France, they want to send products >30 kg on pallets but we do not prefer that. I am not sure if Bijenkorf sells big products as well but if you do, do you have tips?
A: We have no experience with heavy-weight items.
Alban: La Poste ships parcels <30kg. I know that TNT use pallets from 70kg. Below that, you should be good to go (https://www.tnt.com/express/fr_fr/site/envoi-colis/envoi-gros-colis.html)
Q: @Barbara. Do you work with French SEO / SEM agency?
A: We have French SEO specialists inhouse in our office in Amsterdam.
Q: @Cedric: do you also have a specific focus on selling French Brands via the Bijenkort website? or only one from NL? For example: Made in France branded?
A: We want to make our offer as relevant as possible for the French consumers and will be adding more relevant French brands in the future.
Q: @Inge is the site locally adapted as well?
A: A number of local regulatory requirements are reflected on our frontend
Q: @Inge Do you use internal or external reviews systems or both?
A: We only use our internal review system: every booker is invited to leave a review after checkout. This way we can verify that we only have reviews from people that have actually stayed at the accommodation.
Q: @ Inge do you translate all your reviews?
A: Yes. Next to a large team of language specialists who can translate and localise content, we have developed our own inhouse translation tool based on machine learning that translates content such as reviews in up to 42 languages.
