Consolidators of unsold goods or end of lines

Once again, in the real world, the remainders of stock represent a problem that many companies have difficulty in managing, as it is not possible or viable to let it be widely known among their customers that they have small amounts of stock remainders. Thanks to the potential of computer networks, and in particular Internet, they find it much easier to deal with selling these awkward stocks.

Dégriftour, the biggest French online commercial site, belongs to this group consolidators of unsold goods. Its example has almost become a textbook case, as it is also very typical of the problems encountered by the big names on Minitel when they move onto Internet. The majority of webmarketers insist that the business concepts of the two networks are completely different, but to no avail : the world of telecommunications assures us that there is no problem, that the transfer from one network to another can be made without a hitch. The example of Dégriftour shows clearly that the reverse is true, that there is nothing simple about it : despite the high levels of intelligence and reactivity of the company's directors, the migration from Minitel to Internet is often a painful process.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Francis Reverse and Pierre Alzon had the great idea of using Minitel to sell unsold tickets from the major airlines (I travelled by Lufthansa twice at prices beyond belief).

The idea, after some opposition from the large corporations, naturally, started to develop gradually, to the point where it was becoming a fairly important business (300 million francs in 1996), although it was still far behind the major tour operators. The company quickly decided, quite logically, to test the medium of Internet, in which it firmly believed. It used the server Silicon Graphics on Unix, and an Oracle data base, the same for Minitel as for Internet. At present, the Dégriftour site includes just over 1200 flights, 2/3 of which depart the same day. The concept took off fairly well, to the extent that in 1997, Internet represented 10% of the company's turnover (25 million francs for nearly 11,000 sales). During just the first quarter of 1998, sales had already exceeded those of the previous year. The company forecasts that a third of its turnover will be from Internet within the next two years, with 50% in the long run. So where is the problem ?

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