Meeting with Antoine Cheul, Shopopop Co-Founder and CEO.
Created in 2015 with the idea of allowing everyone to deliver their neighbor’s groceries, Shopopop now counts more than 300 000 users. After 2 years of testing, it really was in 2017 that the company started its growth with about 20% more per month since the end of the year.
A rapid increase in activity… without any stress
During the Covid-19 period the demand for home delivery has exploded. Shopopop has been recognized as a public utility by the Ministry of the Economy of France, which has given them a big boost. Some of their click and collect partners have multiplied their activity by 10 in terms of delivery. During the first two days, the customer service was completely underwater but the entire collaborator team was mobilized to help them.
Antoine, how did you experience this atypical period for your company?
These months were very intense but we were able to adapt quickly, the organization went very well, all our teams were very responsive and we all knew how to help each other.
Unusual fact for us: we had to hire without meeting and integrating our future collaborators in real life during lockdown! Today we can’t wait to go back to the office normally and to be able to celebrate the fact that we stood our ground and that everything went well.
With this rapid growth, have you been worried that your infrastructure will saturate?
From 2015 to 2017 we were using another cloud provider and we had a lot of crashes. Since 2017, we have been using Clever Cloud and we can re-focus on the value of our app and the comfort of our users.
Clever Cloud service allowed us to be very calm despite the threefold increase of our activity.
We didn’t have to do anything on the infrastructure part and the technical support was very responsive when we encountered bugs. All segments (payment, data, visits) held up, and this is all the more important in this type of situation.
The fact that we are hosted in France greatly reassures our customers, it is a guarantee of quality, of seriousness. Everything in relation to GDPR is a real issue for our partners.
What’s coming for Shopopop?
One of our main challenges is to open up internationally, to allow us to grow. We have a lot of topics underway for our internationalization, but it will always be less insane than a threefold increase in three days. We are confident in our future, in the fact that our infrastructure will take the shock and also that it will increase in costs gradually.
Thank you Antoine for your time, hope to see you soon!