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Carrefour Indonesia Jumps into E-Commerce, Wants to Change How You Shop

Retail giant Carrefour Indonesia is launching its online shopping platform today, enabling its customers to purchase items from the comfort from their home. They would still need to come over to the store and pick it up, but the company claims this still speeds things up significantly. The program is called “Carrefour Click & Drive,” customers can pick up their groceries as in as fast as five minutes, the company claims. At the moment, the program is only available for its flagship store Carrefour Lebak Bulus location. The interface is quite easy as you can browse through the selected product categories on the website. You choose which product you want, add it to the shopping cart, arrange the pick-up recipient and time slot, then make the payment. But note that you can’t buy fresh products such as bread and fruits online.

When you want to pick up the groceries, the Carrefour e-commerce team would need to verify if the recipient is indeed the right person using his or her ID. Adrien Barthel, the online marketing manager of Carrefour Indonesia explained to us that they have a specific area where Carrefour team waits for the customers, and he claims that the customers can park easily there. The area is pictured below: Regarding the payment system, Carrefour only offers a credit card payment system, either through its Mega Carrefour card, or through Visa or Master Card. Adrien noted that they are working on enlarging the payment options in the future. When asked if they are considering to use a delivery system, he said that they are focusing on improving the current platform first, one step at a time. He then added: Carrefour Group has deployed the same mechanism across France, Belgium, and Spain. The Click & Drive service in Europe is becoming very popular among customers.

Technically speaking, the platform we are using right now has been especially designed for our Indonesian operations.

This Click & Drive service is the first of a kind in Asia. Adrien then explains the reason why they chose Indonesia for the beta version in Asia:

Indonesia is a country where the online industry is booming. In 2011, we came up with a new version of our website displaying the catalogues and the promotion, and we also became one of the top players among the social media activity. Our Facebook fanpage Carrefour.Indonesia has more than 760,000 fans and is very active.

So the final step was to bridge our online audience to our main activity, by providing the online shopping experience to our customers. A word of caution though, Carrefour doesn’t like Google Chrome much. When we (myself and another colleague) tried registering ourselves using Chrome at the site, we couldn’t see any verification “captcha” to be typed. Whereas with Firefox, we could see the captcha just fine and were able to register. Adrien’s Chrome seemed to work just fine though. They are checking this out at the moment.

Seems like online shopping platforms are the trend right now as Japan’s internet company DeNA just announced its plans to create an online shopping services with retail store Seiyu a few weeks ago.