Prestashop's CEO, Alexandre Eruimy, looks back on the latest news of the e-commerce platform.
You have been bought by MBE Worldwide, an Italian publisher, at the end of 2021, what will be the synergies between your two companies?
By integrating this group, we will be in a position to develop an even more integrated value proposition. PrestaShop remains a French company, an autonomous subsidiary of the group, offering different solutions that connect to the platform: payment, logistics, marketing, storage... to enable our merchants to sell online. This acquisition is an opportunity to speed up our growth in the coming years through the support of a leading industrial player.
We will be in a position to win over new customers, firstly in our traditional markets, notably in Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and Poland) - where we have 600,000 customers and 1 million worldwide - and thus strengthen our leadership, but also in Latin America. The United States and Australia are two strong markets for MBE. Today, MBE has more than 2,800 sites in 53 countries serving one million business customers and more than 12,000 partners. In 2020, it had total sales of 879 million euros.
What are your latest news?
In December, we entered into a strategic partnership with Google. PrestaShop becomes the first platform in Europe to be natively integrated to the Google environment. The challenge is to easily connect our stores to the different Google products. This module "PrestaShop Marketing with Google" allows the 300 000 e-merchants operating on our platform to easily connect their store to Google and promote products to millions of potential buyers.
Available in France and worldwide, this new solution allows merchants to display their products on Google in just a few clicks and be discovered by millions of Internet users on Google Search, Shopping tab, YouTube, Google Images and other networks. Merchants can create Smart Shopping ad campaigns, and review their performance metrics, without leaving the PrestaShop interface.
We also partnered with TikTok to develop the social commerce feature and connect the sellers' catalogs to the platform and allow them to address a new customer base.
How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
Our fundamental difference lies in our value proposition based on open source. A company using PrestaShop owns its store, chooses where it wants to host its data and has access to freedom of choice in terms of customization of its store, whether in terms of customer experience, integration and existing technology tools. The scalability of the solution allows to deploy catalogs of several tens of thousands of products, to support the peaks of activity, to sell internationally...
What are your strategic goals for 2022?
We aim to become the leading e-commerce platform for business growth worldwide. We will continue to integrate innovative solutions to improve the customer experience. The second objective is to develop new editions that will allow merchants to have an embedded shopping experience with services and technological solutions to grow faster. We will continue our international development with new teams in Europe and continue to grow our community, especially our network of agency partners who are ideally placed to support the digital transformation of companies.