Jacco Oosterhof shifted his focus area within e-Luscious from wine to coffee. International ambitions are high: "We want to get to ten countries by 2020.
By: Arjan van Oosterhout, editor-in-chief of Twinkle
So says Oosterhof in prelude to his presentation at the CrossBorder Event, on Oct. 3 in Utrecht. E-Luscious is the company behind Wijnvoordeel.nl and other wine sites. With Koffievoordeel, winner of a public award at the Shopping Awards this year, the company is also making inroads in another beverage category. Inside and outside the Netherlands.
Magento migration
Oosterhof: 'We are currently active in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France, with our own operations. Just as we did earlier for wine, we have launched specific labels in all those countries.' For example, Germans can go to Kaffeevorteil.de and French people can go to Cafebonmarche.fr.
The sites are currently being converted from Magento 1 to Magento 2, Oosterhof said, "For the Netherlands and Belgium, that has already been done. We have made it much easier for visitors to go through the assortment. That can be done with our three-step coffee finder, by choosing the brewing method, intensity and desired flavor. Other selection criteria will probably be added, but we have already received super-positive responses.'
On a license basis, Coffee Advantage also operates in Denmark and the Czech Republic. With Spain, the seventh market has recently been mined, in a completely different way. Oosterhof: 'There we started with the site Welikecoffee.com, which runs on Lightspeed.'
'So not a localized name. People point out to me that Spaniards can't pronounce that name at all. But I think we just have to explain well who we are and it will come. I mean: we shop here massively on bol.com, what's in a name? The other country sites will eventually be relabeled Welikecoffee.com as well, Oosterhof hints: 'We have different brands everywhere now, that does limit the scalability.'
Lightspeed
According to the business development director, the choice of a different platform offers the opportunity to quickly develop the international coffee branch: 'We will never completely switch to Lightspeed with e-Luscious, but for coffee, this now offers the opportunity to gain momentum. On Welikecoffee.com we are working with a small isolated cell, a team of all-rounders. I no longer have to coordinate everything within the organization, because things don't fall over elsewhere if we change something. We can decide which partners we use, for example, so we can pioneer, and we can also make mistakes. We have developed a stack that we can easily apply to another country. We have to be agile; there is no time for extensive studies.'
