French supermarket E.Leclerc has launched a new price comparison website to highlight its organic goods, the first of its kind for such a speciality sector. Ronan O’Keeffe reports. Supermarket price comparisons are a popular way for retailers to get one over on their competitors, however, traditional ‘basket’ comparisons is often time-consuming and can be misrepresentative, particularly in terms of comparing private label goods. Now, capitalising on the growth of organic (Bio) products in the French market, E.Leclerc has unveiled a new website www.lebiomoinscher.com (to supplement an existing website, www.quiestlemoinscher.com), where consumers can log on and carry out immediate price comparisons between their favourite organic items in various supermarkets. It’s a familiar storyline - E.Leclerc, naturally enough, emerge cheapest - but the website format and specialised nature of the subject, is an indication of where ‘price comparison’ marketing is headed; and it’s not in the supermarket aisles.
On the original quiestlemoinscher website, shoppers are met with a bold tagline inviting them to compare the prices of 1,486 products, from the eight biggest national retailers. Marquee names are there like Carrefour, Auchan and Intermarché, as well as specialist retailers such as Naturalia. It stands to reason that if the idea worked so well for everyday items, that it was high time to expand its appeal for more specialised goods: in this case, organic. So is this a concept that can have wide reaching consequences? On lebiomionscher.com, shoppers can peruse a slimmed down menu of 302 private label organic products from the same eight retailers, with E.Leclerc proving cheapest in each category, and should shoppers still feel that the price is too high, he or she can click through to the main shopping site, to avail of a cheaper, non-organic private label option again. The new site is being supported by a bizarre television campaign, starring a family that is bombarded by pesticides, before being rescued by a troop of value-orientated carrots - visit http://tinyurl.com/lebioad to check it out. As a campaign, it’s certainly not low-key, and is undoubtedly a win-win situation for E.Leclerc.
Of course, shopping comparison websites have been around before - Ciao is a well-known one, but by creating a specialised site dedicated to a particular channel, E.Leclerc has been able to set the agenda in what is a rapidly expanding organic products market. While retailers understand the power of the Internet to drive sales in-store, they also understand the need to stay relevant, and to catch on to the ‘next big thing’. E.Leclerc has now achieved that with organic, and now it’s up to Carrefour, Auchan or any other significant European retailer to find their online niche. © 2010 - ESM: European Supermarket Magazine
