Interview with Jérome Thré-Hardy, Co-Founder of maPlatine.com

[mdsojolh444]

Facebook
Twitter

Pinterest
LinkedIn
Photo of the founder of maPlatine.com

Hello Jérôme, can you introduce us to the concept of maPlatine.com?
maPlatine.com is an e-commerce site that was created a little over three years ago. We offer the largest European catalog of the vinyl turntable market, with more than 1000 products available: vinyl turntables that range from a few hundred euros to several tens of thousands of euros, and accessories that range from a few tens to several thousand euros.

It is this density of offer, as well as our philosophy, which is to place the customer at the heart of our business model by offering them the best advice, service and product, which have allowed us to become the French leader in platinum sales, while making a large number of sales throughout Europe.



What were the main phases of development of the project, particularly at the website level?
The first step was to define the Business Plan for maPlatine.com, in November and December 2010. Having built this Business Plan allowed us to begin our search for funds and investors, which led to the creation gambling data india of the company in July 2011. At the same time, we began looking for a web agency to develop the website for maPlatine.com. The creation of the site was completed in December 2011, the date we started our activity.

In total, the project development process, from the idea to the launch of the activity, lasted more than a year!

You have chosen to work with an agency. What is your feedback? Under what conditions do you think a project leader can consider this option?
The choice to go through an agency naturally seemed obvious, because neither my partner nor I felt we had the technical skills to create a site. By working with an agency, we were able to benefit from know-how that goes beyond just technical skills. An agency is able to advise based on mistakes that have been made on previous projects, and has a perspective that even a very good developer who works alone does not necessarily have. The development function in an agency maintains a freshness and a level of emulation that is difficult to replicate by internalizing it.

We also decided to work with a Rennes agency, maPlatine.com being also located in Rennes. I personally believe that geographical proximity should be taken into account when choosing an agency. Beyond the technical management of the project, human management is greatly facilitated, and being able to sit around a table with the developers working on our project is very important to ensure that everyone is on the same wavelength.

You were using a proprietary CMS before recently deciding to use Prestashop. What motivated this decision?
We had indeed started the activity of maPlatine.com with a proprietary CMS of the agency with which we work. Honestly, I really do not recommend it. Any modification or need for a new functionality required a lot of work on our part to define new functionalities, to exchange during development, which was ultimately counterproductive.

Prestashop, on the contrary, has a very dynamic community and therefore gave us the opportunity to have access to a complete ecosystem, to solutions, to additional modules, which can be adapted to maPlatine.com without us necessarily having to be a force for proposals. The quality of the support was also one of the factors that we took into account.

Today, we do not regret this decision. I think we have gained a lot in flexibility, which is an important factor for an e-commerce site. Our customers' tastes, Google's standards, in short, our entire environment is constantly evolving and having a scalable tool is necessary for us to be efficient in the long term.

Did you have to face any significant difficulties when launching maPlatine.com that you had not (sufficiently) anticipated at the start?
Managing banking and logistics flows turned out to be more complicated than we had anticipated. For an e-commerce site, we tend to prepare several processes that we imagine to be exhaustive, before having to deal with very specific cases that had not been considered. Managing these specific cases requires building up our knowledge over the long term in order to be as efficient as possible.

And a word of conclusion?
My advice for all those carrying out an e-commerce project is to know how to surround yourself well. A good team has complementary know-how. This requires being aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

As part of maPlatine.com, we did not have skills in logistics and development. The choice was therefore made to outsource these areas through service providers. As a result, we were able to focus on our core business, marketing and customer relations, while having greater flexibility on the outsourced areas. This allowed us to be able to cope effectively when our business grew, which would have been much more complicated if we had internalized everything.

It is very complicated to do everything yourself, and it can be counterproductive. However, you must be able to re-internalize the knowledge once you develop your activity.