Stéphane Ronse established Foodbag in 2014, a food delivery service that doesn’t just deliver local and fresh ingredients, but that also inspires people with original recipes. Stéphane explains how CM.com has helped Foodbag grow from a local start-up to one of the biggest online players in Belgium.
Online Payments PlatformStéphane wanted to cook a healthy, fresh and varied meal after a busy day at work, without having to leave the house. There wasn’t a proper possibility to do so in Belgium at the time, so he started Foodbag in 2014, with huge success. Nowadays Foodbag is serving 6,000 families in Flanders and Brussels and they delivered over 1.6 million meals in 2019.
Stéphane explains that Foodbag is one of a kind. “First of all, we are entirely Belgian. The products in our food boxes are all produced by local suppliers and they produce on demand. You can trace our food back directly to its source and all our products will be delivered to the customer’s kitchen within 24-36 hours. The storage time in refrigerated space is therefore kept to a minimum which means it requires less energy and food waste is also minimized. We strive to be completely carbon neutral.”
Apart from that, Foodbag wants to be more than just a food delivery service. They want to inspire consumers by compiling original menus together with Belgian chefs.
Soon after the foundation of Foodbag, Stéphane decided to collaborate with a payment partner to support the growth. “We enable our customers to subscribe. That is one of the reasons we were looking for a partner that knows how to handle recurring payments. It is very important to offer a variety of relevant payment methods, especially in ecommerce. CM.com turned out to be the best party to process our payments.”
There was another important reason for Stéphane to choose CM.com: personal contact. “Despite the fact that we were a relatively small player, we were taken seriously from the start. They always make time to help us think about certain solutions. Once a decision is made, they switch quickly to realize our wishes. Besides that, we have a direct line to the account manager to provide us with technical support if needed. Their system is close to 100% uptime and the stability is very important to us.”
Our personal interaction and our talks about our vision for the future, resulted in the question how to increase the conversion rate on our website. “CM.com proposed to change the look and feel of the payment environment to match Foodbag’s look and feel. We took their advice and we’re not just very satisfied with the user-friendly checkout they created for our customers, but also with the strongly increased conversion rate. To us, CM.com is more that just a payment provider; they are a payment partner in the entire customer journey.”
Foodbag also handles refunds regularly. Stéphane: “We assemble the food boxes manually. Every weekend there are around 300.000 actions to be performed in our warehouse and there is always a chance that a food box is incomplete. Thanks to the seamless integration with CM.com, our customers receive their refunds quickly.
According to Stéphane, this relationship is also reflected in the financial reports. “The payout of an order may occur in another period than the actual purchase. The CM.com system gives us a clear overview of orders, dates and transactions.”
The outbreak and spread of coronavirus was also a development that Foodbag wanted to respond to. “When Belgium went into lockdown, we immediately used CM.com’s SMS module to inform our customers and to communicate about the changes in our policy. During this period, we experienced that CM.com is a lot more than a Payment Service Provider. They actively participated in thinking about the ingredients we needed to get through these difficult times. Because we adapted well to this covid-19 situation, we have grown rapidly.”
Stéphane is also excited about CM’s continuous drive for innovation. “In the following years, consumers will be provided with more options for digital payments. That makes it even more important for us to have a payment partner that is able to respond quickly to the changes in market conditions, allowing us to stay ahead and to offer the best customer experience.”
Stéphane is looking for ways to optimize and personalize the processes. “Together with CM.com we are investigating options to make things even easier for our customers. We would, for instance, like to use payment links to offer other products to our customers. In the next phase, we would like to segment customers and send them personalized messages to offer them products that match their wishes and diet. A link in that same message will enable them to add these products to their next order. In line with that, it might be possible to have a chatbot for customer support in the future, that can give personal advice to customers about food boxes that match their taste. In any case, we have a taste for our collaboration with CM.com!”
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