Trade page · Shops, e-commerce, retail
“I saw it cheaper elsewhere.” The line lands at the till, and you have no way to check it, or to know since when. In the evening, the catalogue still needs updating and the same questions need answering again. I connect automations to your current tools so you decide with the figures instead of being at their mercy, and the selling stays yours.
The numbers behind the trade
Because there's no one to do it. 95% of French retail businesses are micro-businesses, and between them, they employ less than one full-time equivalent employee per business.
The figures come from Insee, Ésane database, 2023 financial year, published September 2025. French retail, excluding cars, counts 462,465 businesses, of which 440,441 are micro-businesses sharing 356,437 full-time-equivalent employees between them. Facing them, 695 large and mid-sized businesses generate €298.8bn of the sector's €579.2bn, more than half on their own. Those 695 have teams whose job it is to monitor market prices and keep product listings up to date. You have Saturday evening.
95% micro-businesses
440,441 of the 462,465 French retail businesses are micro-businesses, while 695 large businesses make more than half the sector's revenue. It isn't a question of sales talent, it's a question of hands. The price next door moves, the product listing stays empty, the same question comes back for the thirtieth time this week: at your place, nobody has time to deal with it, and it ends up showing in the margin.
The backdrop has shifted under your feet, and that's the second half of the problem. Inflation fell back to 0.9% in 2025, after 2.0% in 2024 and 4.9% in 2023, while retail sales accelerated by 2.3% by volume. Translation for your till: the general rise in prices no longer carries your revenue. What's left is the price you display against the one next door, product by product. For three years, everyone went up together. Now, every price tag is a decision.
On online sales, one figure is worth more than a speech: distance selling accounts for 8.3% of retail sales excluding cars in 2025, against 7.0% in 2019, and it's been roughly stable since 2023. Your shop isn't evaporating, then. But the customer who walks through your door has already compared prices on their phone, and in clothing, the French sales rankings are led by Vinted, Amazon and Shein, players who move their prices constantly. The online comparison tool, meanwhile, runs continuously.
That leaves the toughest figure, and I'll give it with its caveat. Retail lives on high volumes and thin margins: the FCD notes that the net after-tax margin of food superstores runs at around 1% of revenue, far below that of their multinational suppliers. This figure is about large-scale retail, not your shop, and your margin isn't theirs. But the principle carries over without effort: when the margin is thin, a pricing mistake left standing for three weeks isn't made up for by volume. It costs you.
Sources: Insee, “Caractéristiques du commerce de détail selon la taille des entreprises”, annual data 2023, Ésane database, published 18 September 2025 (scope: France, retail excluding cars and motorcycles) · Insee Première no. 2111, “Le compte du commerce en 2025”, June 2026 (trade accounts, 2020 base, provisional account) · FCD, “Évolutions du commerce et de la distribution: faits et chiffres”, November 2025 (net margins based on OFPM data and groups' consolidated accounts; clothing sales ranking based on the Institut français de la mode barometer).
What I install
Three things, in this order: monitoring the competition's prices, product listings and the catalogue, the requests that come back every day. Choosing what you sell, welcoming a customer who's hesitating, slipping in the advice that makes the sale: that stays you, and it has to stay you.
Every night, a system checks the prices of the competitors you've chosen, on the products that matter. In the morning, before opening, the table is ready: who's moved, in which direction, by how much. You stop searching and just look, then decide whether to match or not. This is automated price monitoring, and it's the first project for almost every retailer who calls me.
An empty listing, or one copied from the supplier, gets you nothing on Google: the search engine sees the same text on thirty sites and moves on. We start from what you know about your products, the machine puts it into shape listing after listing in a template built around your voice, you check it over and publish. More than 4,000 listings kept up to date for one online retailer, approved in batches, instead of months of postponed writing.
Opening hours, whether a product's in stock, delivery times, the returns policy: these are the same requests every day, by phone, by email and by private message. An assistant answers with your own answers and hands over to you the moment something falls outside its scope. Customer reviews, meanwhile, come back to you sorted, with a draft reply: the one you never write for lack of time.
How much it costs
From €1,900 to €5,800 excl. VAT to set up, depending on whether you add price monitoring or not, plus €290/month if you do. Prices published, scope written down, and I almost always advise starting with monitoring, because that's where the margin leaks away.
€1,900 excl. VAT setup + €290/month
The competition's prices checked every night, and an alert before the margin slips away
Your competitors' prices checked every night on the products you choose, the comparison table, sorted alerts and the weekly report. The technology is included in the subscription, no commitment. The detail of what's installed.
€3,900 excl. VAT
Your product listings written in batches, and the same customer questions handled without you
Product listings in batches, repetitive requests, customer reviews, follow-ups: 3 to 5 automations installed in your current tools, delivered in 2 to 3 weeks. Scope written at the Scan, then a fixed price, 30-day guarantee.
A real case
Three weeks to notice that a competitor had undercut his price. Today, less than twenty-four hours. That's the case of an appliance retailer who called me, annoyed: on three of his flagship products, sales had dropped for weeks without him understanding why. We found the reason in five minutes. His real question wasn't “how do I lower my prices”, it was “how do I stop being the last to know”.
What got in the way is worth telling. In the first few days, the system cried wolf: dozens of price drops flagged that weren't real ones, weekend promotions mistaken for new prices. At that rate, he'd have matched temporary sales prices, and worse, he'd have ended up not reading the alerts at all any more. So we added a filter that tells a real trend apart from a passing promotion and only surfaces what deserves a decision. The best moment came afterwards: one morning, the table shows a competitor clearly under his price. Instead of matching it, he saw that the other retailer was out of stock on the most requested version, and he put his own immediate availability right next to the price. He sold at a higher price that day, because he knew.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. A price displayed publicly on a website is public data, and comparison sites and large chains alike have been checking it continuously for years. I only look at what's accessible to any visitor, at a reasonable pace that respects the sites involved. What's forbidden is agreeing prices with your competitors: that's called price-fixing, and it has nothing to do with looking at a price tag.
What Google penalises isn't the tool, it's hollow text and copy-pasting. A description copied from your supplier, it already sees on thirty sites, and it has no reason to rank you above the others. So we start from what you know about your products, and the machine puts that knowledge into shape, one listing after another, in a template built around the way you talk. The test takes ten seconds: hide your logo and read three listings. If they could belong to any competitor, we rework the template before publishing.
In the vast majority of cases, yes. A Shopify, WooCommerce or PrestaShop shop, till software, a product file in Excel, a mailbox: I connect to what you already have, you don't change tools and you don't re-enter your catalogue. If your software is genuinely closed off, I'll tell you at the Scan, with the alternative and its cost, before you've signed anything at all.
That's actually the size where it shows the most, because there's no one but you to do it. The maths comes down to two lines: the hours you get back, and the margin you stop letting slip for want of spotting a price move in time. You can test it yourself this week: take your five best-selling products and note down two competitors' prices on them every morning. In seven days, you'll know whether the subject is worth automating for your business. If the numbers don't add up, I'll tell you at the scoping call and we'll leave it there.
30 minutes on the phone, free of charge, no jargon: you leave with your figures in hours and euros, even if you don't end up working with me. Or count your hours yourself in 30 seconds.
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