Founded in 1936, Le Furet du Nord  is a bookstore that sells cultural products: books, stationery, multimedia, disks and videos. With 10 stores, this brand has become indispensable to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region due to its historical location in Lille's Grand-Place and its philosophy that combines the strengths of small bookstores with those of large scale distribution. The increase in Furet de Lille's sales area in 1982 and again in 1992 (from 500 to 4500 and then to 6000 m² over 8 floors) made it one of the largest book stores in Europe. Today, on average, 12 000 visitors "browse" the store everyday. Le Furet du Nord called on Smile to deploy Furet du Nord's web platform - a B2B and B2C site including HR and corporate sections as well as a connection to Furet du Nord's IT services. Up to the current time, Furet du Nord had a partnership with lalibrairie.com for selling a few products online. Due to the increase in the sale of cultural products online, Furet du Nord views the web as a new driver for increasing sales.

How do you find the book you are looking for amongst 1 300 000 products?

 The search engine is a key feature of any retail website and special attention should be paid to its implementation. Due to the large amount of products available on the site, Smile decided to integrate the search engine SoIR running on Lucène instead of Magento's in build engine. This engine combines three essential qualities:

• Performance: results should be displayed instantly.
• Relevance: search results should be based on sophisticated rules so that the products which best match the customer's expectations always feature at the top of the list.
• Ergonomy: the search interface should be simple and intuitive.

 The search engine also provides lists of the most searched for keywords, based on previous searches by means of a keyword cloud. One of the strengths of le Furet stores lies in the the work of their bookstore assistants. Leaflets produced by the bookstore assistants are usually available in different sections of the store and have been reproduced on the website. What's more, all customers can have their products delivered to them either to a collection point or to a store after checking the stock in real time online. This approach gives customers who are attached to their stores the feeling that they are still in close contact with them.

How do you combine B2C and B2B sales?

 www.furet.com  has a business area for local authorities, libraries, media libraries and documentation centres. The products available in the B2B section are identical to those in the general public section. The aim of this platform is to provide a workflow system suited to professionals. A business customer can:

• browse the site and make their selection,
•  generate a quote with an alert if it exceeds the budget allocated by their superiors,
•  ask for validation from their superiors who can consult and confirm quotes online,
• confirm their purchase and proceed to online payment.

 This system of confirmation is flexible and can be adapted to suit each customer's requirements.

How do you monitor e-commerce sites, the launch of new products and sales administration?

 A large number of products are added or updated daily (from 500 to a few thousand). Smile has created a ised import system that runs every night to import new products, new images etc, The connection to Furet du Nord's IT system is composed of two types of feed:

• the exchange of files for transferring orders, their progress, B2B customers or best sellers,
• the use of web services for consulting the stock of each store in real time

Magento contains a certain number of statistical reports which can be viewed via an administration interface. These reports concern sales, average basket, products, customers, comments, and the most used keywords.