Bilboquet is a games and toys store in downtown Vannes that is also known online on the national scene thanks to a niche activity: kites. After suffering through the yellow vest crisis and then the first lockdown, Delphine Vilmen the manager, is putting all her energy into continuing her business with online sales, introducing click and collect and thus keeping the link with her local customers.
Delphine Vilmen, what's your business?
I run a toy store in downtown Vannes and two e-commerce sites. One is dedicated to games and toys: www.bilboquet.com The other is dedicated to kites and mobility (scooters, bikes, skateboards, longboards, etc.): www.bilboquetsport.com .
In games and toys, our target is very local; customers like to come and ask for advice in store. On the other hand, with kites, because it's a hobby, and with mobility, because it's a rather connected teenage target, our target is national, and we sell a lot online.
Today, e-commerce accounts for 30% of our sales. With this second containment, we need to double that.
>> No need to unpack newly-arrived scooters, the store becomes a stockroom rather than a demonstration area.
Tell us more about the Covid19 crisis and the need to adapt your retail business...
We survived the first containment because there was a real awareness on the part of customers, who supported local shops. For this second containment, we need the same surge of solidarity, but I don't know if it will be enough. Today, all the stock has arrived and been paid for... I absolutely have to find a way of selling it. E-commerce seems to be our only way out, but the competition from supermarkets, which can sell "non-essential" products, and the competition from marketplaces are terrible. There's a real sense of injustice.
And we mustn't forget that before the Covid-19 health crisis, there was the Gilets Jaunes crisis, which also did a lot of damage to local commerce. We had two stores at the time and we had to close one because of the Gilets Jaunes crisis: it was located next to a blockade zone, we saw no customers for several months.
When I heard about this second confinement, I asked for help from the Vannes federation of shopkeepers, and then from the Town Hall. We were lucky enough to be interviewed by Ouest-France and benefit from press exposure that has boosted our business. We've also been interviewed by France Bleu. And the brands we distribute also help us by giving us more content than usual. All in all, our network is very supportive!
At the very least, this will improve our natural referencing, because to have paid referencing in the toy market during the Christmas shopping season, you need a certain budget... I'm in contact with the Soledis webmarketing team to see what we can do with Adwords in the long term.
In concrete terms, how will your e-commerce business evolve over the next few days?
The most urgent thing is to fill out our website, and that takes a lot of time. We have 15,000 products in our store, and we still need to create 1,000 product sheets in Prestashop to make the whole catalog available online! Each product file takes us between 5 and 10 minutes, depending on how used we are to the Prestashop tool: we have to find the right category (we have a lot of them), fill in the texts in English and French, add visuals and fill in the meta-description to optimize natural referencing. All the company's good hands are called upon, but that's not their job!
When Soledis redesigned the e-commerce site in 2018, I had a webmaster and a graphic designer on my team. They've since left and I've never really been trained to update the website. Fortunately Prestashop is pretty intuitive but it's a multilingual multiboutique, with lots of product categories... There are definitely things I could do better and faster. I've asked Soledis for a training course, in the hope of finding some help with financing.
In addition, our strategy is to try to reproduce online what makes us different in-store. We therefore rely heavily on social networks and personalized contact. We offer themed Facebook Live twice a week ( https://www.facebook.com/bilboquetdotcom ) and personalized advice by videoconference on request. We also sent a €5 discount voucher to our database of 50,000 active customers. For those in Vannes, it's an incentive to ask us for free delivery in Vannes or in-store collection, and for customers elsewhere in France, it reimburses shipping costs.
We want to show that we're alive and kicking, even with the store closed! It's going well so far, and we're getting a lot of encouragement, but it's all being done on a shoestring. We're not very comfortable with video, teleshopping is a first for us and we don't have professional equipment...
Delphine, her hydroalcoholic gel and her team welcome you to pick up your online purchases.
Packaged or unpackaged, depending on the option chosen on the website, your packages are waiting for you in click and collect.
How do you see the future?
The current period is crucial for our industry: Christmas shopping traditionally starts at the beginning of November, with a peak between November 22 and December 7. The duration of the confinement will be decisive. It's very stressful.
But everything we put in place today will be useful in the future. Even without containment, the site has become as important as the store. You can't live without an e-commerce site these days. But it's a very time-consuming activity for which we have no training. Natural referencing, paid referencing, updating the site, upgrades... it's a different business to ours, and we need to be supported.
