The new era of positive impact commerce

2020 was a year that turned everything upside down. The health crisis took its toll on both our personal and our professional lives. Commerce was severely affected by the successive lockdowns, social distancing measures and the impossibility of returning to normality.

As President & CEO of Rakuten France, my special thoughts go to all our merchants, our day-to-day partners, whether they’ve just joined us or have been at our sides from the outset. In response to the crisis, we have supported commerce more than ever and tested the soundness of our ecosystem-based approach in a sector facing risks of predatory practices. An inclusive model that will be significant in 2021 in terms of building our new normality together and bringing positive impact commerce to life for all.

The choice of the ecosystem-based approach

In the Japan of the late 1990s, the world’s first virtual marketplace, Rakuten Ichiba, was conceived as a digital ecosystem of virtuous relations between consumers and merchants. 

Rakuten does not distribute its own products; instead, like a trusted third party, it uses its technology and expertise to serve the merchants hosted on the platform. For consumers, an integral part of the model, we developed a program of systematic rewards for every order to improve their purchasing power. This loyalty program, which now has over 8 million members in France, is the most generous in French e-commerce. Club R has already paid out €100 million to French consumers.

The interdependency between players is the engine of this digital ecosystem and maintains its balance. Thanks to our unique positive commerce model, Rakuten has earned its place, in its own way, amongst the five biggest international e-commerce platforms. Our marketplace has just celebrated its tenth anniversary in France. It hosts more than 8,000 merchants, 85% of which are French. In addition, we have forged alliances with more than 1,000 brands which are part of the Rakuten Club Everywhere. When consumers shop with these brands, they earn points to spend on Rakuten, as per our rationale of interdependency.

Did 2020 finally bring a positive outlook on digitization?

The shockwave caused by the lockdown showed retailers as well as public authorities, communities and merchant associations the importance of digitalizing commerce. Faced with the closure of brick-and-mortar stores, we were prepared to pursue our mission and address their urgent need to sell online to survive. We have devoted all of our know-how and energy to brands, chains, VSBs and SMBs to help them join our marketplace as part of our “E-Commerce for all” scheme, which provides online training, personalized advice and our free tools. The second semester saw a total of 45% more merchants convinced by our approach and docking on our platform compared to last year.

Merchants that crossed the digital line and made use of marketplaces like Rakuten have suffered less in the crisis than the others. They saw their revenue increase by 20% on our platform and, above all, they continue to benefit.

The advent of a “new commerce”

What if there was one key takeaway from the year’s events? French shoppers became aware of the role they could play in a more responsible form of consumption. Commerce is changing before our very eyes.

Omni-channel sales are accelerating, digital and physical commerce are intertwined. Click & collect, a solution encouraged by the Government during the lockdowns, allowed consumers to get involved, with them seeing it as an opportunity to contribute to the survival of their local stores. Throughout France, thanks to Rakuten, the leading omni-channel marketplace, over 5000 stores were connected to this solution and managed to continue operating.

More than ever, our purchasing acts must make sense; we pay more attention to the provenance of what we buy and we support the local economy by favoring local distribution networks or pre-loved items… This is probably why 2020 has been a record year for the sale of second-hand products. Half of the products sold on our platform are second hand: this represents almost 23,000 tons of CO2 emissions saved in a year; that’s equivalent to 16,000 flights between Paris and New York. Whatever the product is, it now seems normal to us to have a choice between new, reconditioned or second-hand, to know where it was assembled and what it’s made of. We are committed to being better consumers!

The crisis has accelerated a shift in the means of consumption. Online purchases are not a transitory practice but a sustainable transformation. As for O2O (Offline to Online), it is picking up speed. Yet this new kind of commerce will always call for more innovation: the arrival of predictive marketing, robotics, self-driving vehicles, drones; these are all examples of breakthroughs that will propel e-commerce into a new era, one offering merchants, and their customers, unprecedented support and service.

It is no coincidence that we bear the name Rakuten meaning “optimism” in Japanese. It’s not only a business philosophy. Above all, it’s the trust we place in technology’s potential to break the glass ceiling. And the trust we place in individuals and organizations to seize all the opportunities available to them.

Let’s move forward together!

Fabien Versavau, President & CEO Rakuten France