19 February 2007

VENTE PRIVEE BOOM

More and more sites that provide vente privee are emerging on the net. The main principles of their functioning are: selling of the big brands for reduced prices (discounts up to 80%) within the limited amount of time (normally not more than 48 hours, though may be up to 1 week).

For being able to participate in these sales, the person should be invited on the site by his/her friend (parrain), who is already registered on the site.

Normally these sites sell clothes, though while this business model is developing , there are more and more other proposals you can meet : food, wine, products for animals and even cars.

The pionnier of the vente privee system was the site vente-privée.com, which operates since 2001 and is really a leader on this market, with the annual revenue exceeding 200 mln Euros, which is constantly growing.

The huge popularity of these sites (more than 70 in France now) is explained by the business-model, which is very lucrative. The system of vente privee is attractive for company itself, for luxury suppliers, and, of course, for customers.

Luxury suppliers benefit from the possibility to sell theis unsold collections (stock-house) very fast (increasing the speed of turnover of the capital) without spending money on advertising, storage and logistic. The big brands work more and more with small limited series which require a constant destocking. For the image of the brand it is rather damaging to expose the devalued unsold clothes in the boutique for a long time. So, this other source of selling its stock-house through the vente privee sites serves like a huge support for the producer.

The brands also profit from the transforming of the care for the stock-house to the third party (vente privee site). For example, vente-privée.com has at its disposal 18 photo-studios and a team of models, graphists and music professionals to provide a top image for the goods, represented on the site.

On top, for the brand it is an extra advertising availability. The customers of vente privee sites get acquainted better with the brand (its style, designs) and one day may wish to buy something in a real boutique.

The company benefits, as it charges some fee on the goods it sells. So, without producing anything and without spending money on operating a shop (as opposed to a phisique boutique), the site makes good profit operating like a mediator.

The customers benefit as they can obtain the top brands for a reasonable price. On top, it can save a lot of time, as it is much faster and more convenient than rambling through a number of phisique boutiques. Everything is rather simple here : several clicks, a number of the credit card and the client can get the dreamed object for a good price.

Though there are some disadvantages as well on these sites : first of all, each sale is very limited in number of articles and in time provided for making a deal. In the same time, the amount of participants, willing to get a product is huge and is growing all the time. That is why, sometimes it occurs that the desired object, that the customer sees on the announce screen, is not available any more in the moment he/she wants to orders it.

Second disadvantage is usually the time it takes to deliver the ordered object. It happens as normally the sites of vente privee dont have any stock at their disposal and should order thelmselves the desired products from the supplier.

That is why, the site vente-privee.com created two big stocks now and can minimise its delivery time.

The target customers of the sites like vente-privee.com are : young people (20-35 years old), who got used to utilize internet in many ways (this kind of customers occupies the biggest portion of buyers through internet as they are more advanced and more internet-oriented than the older generetions) ; business people (for whom the main advantage of it - is time saving). Potentially any person that is interested in fashion for reasonable prices is a client for the vente privee sites.
Nowadays the number of clients of any internet shop is groving rapidly, involving more and more diversified groups of people.

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