E-commerce giant Amazon and French retailer Casino are strengthening their ties by opening lockers in more than 1,000 Casino stores including Monoprix, Monop, Geant, Hyper Casino, Casino Supermarche, Leaderprice, Viva and Spar and more of the French retailer’s products to be available on Amazon.
This move was anticipated following Amazon’s purchase of brick-and-mortar American food retailer Whole Foods last year.
The partnership comes at a time when Casino is looking at selling assets and cutting debt to address investors’ concerns over its finances.
As part of the deal, Amazon and Monoprix will also extend their partnership on Amazon’s Prime Now grocery delivery service outside Paris and into new cities by the end of this year.
This partnership has been closely watched as Monoprix was the first French retailer to agree to sell products via Amazon.
Amazon had long term plans to launch services in French supermarket which is currently dominated by Carrefour and Leclerc, operating at low margins and with a dense network of stores.
However, despite the coming together of two big names, Casino’s shares slipped 0.4% after Standard & Poor’s cut its credit rating on Casino to ‘BB- negative outlook’ from ‘BB negative’ - pushing it further into junk territory.