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Carrefour Began to Offer the Services of a Personal Shopper

The Belgian division of the Carrefour group has developed a new service - the assistance of a personal shopping assistant (shopper), - writes the specialized edition RetailDetail.

The project is called ShipTo and allows customers to choose a personal assistant who should prepared the order from the store, offering alternatives (if the required products are not available), and also orienting in promotions and offers, choosing the cheapest options. The cost of the service is 5 euros, which complete goes to the assistant, Carrefour does not take any commissions from it. The network claims that in this way they hope to improve the lives of people who do not want or can not come to the store because of employment or physical restrictions.

After the formation of the order, it must be delivered to the buyer within 1.5 hours, the service extends to addresses within a radius of 4 km from the store. The pilot project is launched in the resort city of Knokke-Heist, but will soon begin to spread to Brussels, and, if successful, to the rest of Belgium. According to the current plan, by the end of the year the service will be available in 18 stores.

ShipTo may be joined by other nearest stores that are not direct competitors to Carrefour. The founder of RetailDetail, Jörg Snook, notes that this step by the company is logical, citing Rodney Fitch (founder of the Fitch agency): "Only one network can have the lowest prices, everyone else will have to stand out differently - through experience and service."

In other industries, companies also "search for the sacred grail" of services: for example, DIY networks like IKEA or Belgian Hubo are investing in platforms that not only sell goods, but also allow ordering their installation. Even online stores now feel obligated not only to deliver the refrigerator or washing machine, but also to install them, as well as pick up the old ones. Transnational brands also join the trend - Unilever invests in Helpling, a platform for cleaning companies (there is no doubt about which brand cleaning products they use), and its competitor Henkel launched the Dobbi laundry network.

According to Jörg Snuk, this is only the beginning: in the United States, they take the next step: smart cookbooks first check in the refrigerator the availability of the necessary products for the recipe that you need, and then make the order of the missing supplier in the online store, like Peapod or Amazon, one click. The latter can also send along with the ordered products one more package of those that he thinks may be needed. In those rare cases when a company makes a mistake, a refund, of course, is free of charge.

Margarita Aranovska

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