Integrations · Cdiscount
Trade in France from the company you already have.
France is one of the few large European marketplace markets a US brand can enter without forming a European company. Cdiscount’s own marketplace terms define an eligible seller as a business registered in the French commercial register, or in the equivalent register wherever it is domiciled. So the barrier is not your structure. It is French listings, French customer correspondence and stock close enough to hold a credible delivery promise, and those are the three things we put in place.
Where we stand with Cdiscount
A working integration, not a connector on a list
Catalogue, offers, pricing, stock and orders run through Cdiscount’s current API, with your product data flowing from the same central catalogue that feeds your other channels.
The French requirements are the job
Titles to Cdiscount’s prescribed format, descriptions inside its character limits, images to its specification and customer correspondence in French. This is the part of a French launch that has to be built rather than translated, and it is what we take on.
Stock in Europe, not in transit
Our European warehouse puts French orders in the same delivery bracket as a European seller, which changes what Cdiscount will show your customer and what your customer will accept.
The market
Cdiscount is turning itself into a marketplace
The trading story here is unusually clear from the parent company’s own reporting. Cdiscount is deliberately shrinking its first-party retail and growing third-party sellers in its place. Marketplace sales reached 72% of product GMV in the first half of 2026, up from 68% a year earlier, while Cdiscount’s own direct sales fell. Marketplace GMV grew 12.5% over the half, marketplace commissions grew 11.8%, and advertising revenue grew 20.3%.
Read that as an incoming brand and it says something useful. Cdiscount now makes its money from sellers rather than from competing with them, which is a better position to arrive into than a platform still defending its own retail margin. Its active customer base grew 9% over the same half, with new customer recruitment up 18% in the second quarter.
On scale, be clear-eyed. Cdiscount is a strong second-tier French generalist rather than a French Amazon. In its core electronics and household appliances category, France’s ecommerce federation put Cdiscount third in 2025 on customer reach, at 15.0% of category buyers against Amazon’s 34.0%. That is a real audience, concentrated in tech, home and appliances, and it is reached at a commission rate that is often well below the market default.
72%
Marketplace share of Cdiscount product GMV, first half of 2026, from 68% a year earlier
+12.5%
Marketplace GMV growth over the same half
2 million
Cdiscount à Volonté subscribers, which Cdiscount reports as more than 40% of its business volume
Getting on
What Cdiscount asks for, and what it does not
Worth setting out precisely, because the answer here is different from the answer at Otto and different again from bol.com. France does not ask a US company to become a European one.
Requirement
What it means for you
Status
A French or EU company
Cdiscount’s marketplace terms define an eligible seller as a company registered in the French commercial register, or in any equivalent register where the company is domiciled elsewhere. The current terms also address sellers dispatching from outside the EU, which they would not do if such sellers were excluded. Your existing US registration is the equivalent register.
Not required
Registration documents
A company registration extract less than three months old, an identity document for the director, a declaration of beneficial owners and your bank details, submitted unedited, in colour and uncropped — a common cause of a resubmission that costs a fortnight when it is not.
Required
A euro bank account
Payouts go to an IBAN and BIC denominated in euros. A dollar account at a US bank will not receive them. This is worth arranging before you apply rather than during, and it is a conversation we start early with every brand entering the eurozone.
Required
French listings and French service
Listings in French, to Cdiscount’s own title and description formats. Customer correspondence in French for every order, including those delivered to Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium or Luxembourg. Cdiscount maintains its own directory of translation partners for sellers based elsewhere.
Required
VAT registration
Cdiscount asks for a VAT number where one applies to you, but the obligation that actually matters is the legal one: holding stock in France creates a French VAT registration requirement, and selling into the EU brings the wider position with it. This is registration and filing work we handle rather than a marketplace form field.
Depends
Cdiscount’s own review
Registration goes through document and identity checks before the account opens, and acceptance is Cdiscount’s call rather than anyone else’s. Cdiscount does not publish a timetable for it, so we run the catalogue, translation and compliance work alongside the application rather than waiting on it.
Their call
Requirements here are drawn from Cdiscount’s published marketplace terms and its own seller guidance as at September 2026. Marketplaces change their conditions, so we confirm the current position with you rather than working from a page. Cdiscount also operates a business-buyer side, and a single catalogue serves both consumer and professional buyers unless you restrict it to consumers.
The delivery promise
Where your stock sits decides what the customer is told
Cdiscount publishes the delivery windows it quotes to shoppers, and they are set by where the parcel starts. This is the single clearest argument for holding stock in Europe, because it is not our opinion about conversion. It is the number on the product page.
Dispatched from the US
Contractually permitted, and quoted to the shopper accordingly
10 to 20
days
Dispatched from European stock
Our warehouse in the Netherlands sits in this bracket
2 to 7
days
Dispatched inside France
Available through Cdiscount’s own fulfilment arm if you want it
1 to 3
days
Cdiscount’s published windows for standard parcels. Larger and bulkier items carry longer windows in every bracket. Where you ship from more than one location, Cdiscount asks you to declare the country with the longest shipping time, so a tidy single-origin arrangement is worth more here than it looks.
Two million subscribers you cannot reach from a US warehouse
Cdiscount à Volonté is the paid loyalty programme, and Cdiscount reports its members as more than 40% of business volume and says they order around three times as much as non-members. Reaching them means either using Cdiscount’s own fulfilment or joining its Express Seller programme.
Express Seller is open to sellers dispatching from France or elsewhere in Europe, which is the bracket our Netherlands warehouse sits in. It is closed to a seller shipping from the United States. That is the practical cost of running France on air freight from home, and it is larger than the freight bill.
Dispatch origin. France or Europe, delivering to mainland France.
Speed. Express or tracked delivery inside 72 hours.
Reliability. A delivery rate at or above 96% within the stated window.
Tracking. Every order carrying a tracking number from an approved carrier.
Proving it. Cdiscount watches delivery quality across a 30 day period before it switches the programme on.
Cost. €49 a month, on top of the standard seller subscription.
Local detail
What selling here actually asks of you
None of this is difficult once it is known. All of it costs time or sales when it is discovered late.
Titles to a prescribed pattern
Cdiscount sets the format: brand, then product type, then keywords, then model. There is a 132 character ceiling on the listing title and a separate 30 character label that has to carry the brand and appears on the customer’s invoice.
Descriptions with the marketing taken out
The short description runs to 420 characters, in French, characteristics only. No price, no shipping terms, no warranty language, no other brands. Persuasion belongs in the optional longer field, not this one.
A catalogue review that takes weeks
Products matched to an existing sheet by barcode go live quickly. Anything needing a new product sheet goes to Cdiscount’s team for categorisation and can sit there for up to 20 days, and manual creation is capped at 100 products a week.
Images to specification
White background, single product face on, nothing overlaid. No text, logos, watermarks or badges on the image itself. Cdiscount says products carrying several images sell three times as often, and allows four.
A longer returns window at Christmas
The standard French withdrawal right is 14 days. Sellers extend it to 30 days for the whole of November and December, and the refund is due no later than the day the return arrives back.
Service standards written into the contract
Cdiscount’s terms treat complaints above 2%, a dispatch rate below 90% or on-time delivery below 90% as a serious breach, measured on rolling windows. Local stock and a French-speaking service desk are how those numbers stay healthy.
The commercials
What it costs to be there
Published by Cdiscount, and worth modelling before you commit a catalogue rather than after.
Subscription
€39.99 a month excluding VAT, with no opening fee, no listing limit and no sales ceiling. Cancellable at any time.
Commission
15% on most categories, charged on the tax-inclusive price plus the shipping the customer pays. Cdiscount discounts where it is strongest and charges more where margins are: large electrical appliances at 8%, wine and spirits at 10%, televisions and computers in single figures, against 16% on watches, 17% on home furniture and 20% on fashion jewellery. Used and refurbished goods carry two points more.
Payouts
Three times a month, on the 1st, 11th and 21st, after the order has been accepted and dispatch confirmed. An immediate payout can be requested from the seller dashboard.
The guarantee reserve
Cdiscount holds back a reserve against refund risk, sized on your sales flow and recalculated monthly, with full release inside 24 months. It is not a feature of most US marketplace payouts, so it belongs in the cash flow model from the start rather than in a surprise in month two.
One price, several countries
Cdiscount reaches Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy and Luxembourg alongside France, and international selling is switched on at no extra cost. For now a single tax-inclusive price applies across all of them, with shipping costs set separately, so the pricing decision is made once rather than per market.
Cdiscount runs its own technology, and sells it to other retailers
Cdiscount does not sit on a third party marketplace platform. It built its own, and Octopia, its subsidiary, now runs that platform for other retailers across Europe and beyond. For a seller already on Cdiscount, those other retailers become channels that can be switched on from the same seller account and fed from the same catalogue.
Octopia markets access to marketplaces across eighteen countries, among them CDON in Sweden, OnBuy in the UK, Kiabi and Maxeda. Integrator documentation describes Cdiscount as the entry point to it: a product goes live on Cdiscount first, and the other channels in the network follow from there. So a French launch can be the first channel rather than the only one, provided the catalogue behind it is built properly the first time.
What we handle
Everything between the decision and the first order
Registered and filing
French VAT registration and ongoing returns, producer responsibility registrations, label review and Responsible Person appointment for the EU, with the Cdiscount account application and document pack alongside them.
Stock inside Europe
Your inventory at our European warehouse, picked and dispatched into France at European delivery speeds, with returns coming back to a European address and handled in region rather than flown home.
Listed in French, properly
Catalogue mapping to Cdiscount’s category tree, titles and descriptions written to its formats in French, images prepared to its specification, published from the same catalogue that feeds your other channels.
Where this sits alongside your DTC expansion
France is one of the markets where the marketplace door is open to you as you are, so Cdiscount is a route you can work now rather than one you have to qualify for. That is worth saying plainly, because it is not true of Otto in Germany and it is only conditionally true of bol.com in the Netherlands.
It still runs at Cdiscount’s pace. Documents get checked, new product sheets get reviewed, and the account opens when Cdiscount says it does. Every piece of work that gets you there also builds your own French storefront: the VAT registration, the European stock, the French product content, the local returns path. Run the store from the start and you are trading in France while the marketplace application is still moving, with the margin the marketplace would have taken and a customer list that belongs to you.
The store and the marketplace are built from the same parts. Start the one that nobody has to approve.
Global Expansion Pathway™
Adding France without rebuilding the operation
Cdiscount sits at the Omni-Channel stage of the Global Expansion Pathway™, delivered as the E-commerce Expansion Multiplier™. The point of the stage is that a new channel draws on registrations, stock and product data you already have rather than starting its own version of each. French translation and Cdiscount’s own content formats are genuine additional work, and they are done once into the central catalogue, which is also what the Octopia network reads from when you extend beyond France.
Questions
What brands ask about France
Do we need a French company to sell on Cdiscount?
No. Cdiscount’s marketplace terms cover companies registered outside France and outside the EU, and the current terms deal expressly with sellers dispatching from outside the EU. What you do need is a euro bank account for payouts, the registration and identity documents Cdiscount asks for at sign-up, and French-language listings and customer correspondence. Where stock sits in France, French VAT registration follows as a matter of law rather than as a Cdiscount rule.
Should we be on Cdiscount or Amazon.fr?
Both, in most cases, and the interesting question is what each is for. Amazon.fr is the larger audience. Cdiscount is concentrated in tech, home and appliances, charges single-figure commission in several of those categories, and comes with a route into the wider Octopia network. If your catalogue sits in its strong categories, the margin arithmetic often favours listing on both rather than choosing.
Can we serve France from our Netherlands stock?
Yes, and it is the arrangement we would normally recommend. European dispatch puts you in Cdiscount’s 2 to 7 day bracket instead of the 10 to 20 days quoted on a US-dispatched order, and it keeps the Express Seller programme available to you. Cdiscount’s own fulfilment arm holds stock inside France if you want the domestic bracket, and the two can run alongside each other.
How much French do we actually need?
More than a translated product feed and less than a French office. Listings have to be written in French to Cdiscount’s formats, and customer correspondence has to be in French for every order, including the ones going to Germany or Spain. Both are services rather than hires, and Cdiscount publishes a directory of translation partners of its own.
Find out what France would take, and what it would return
Thirty minutes on your categories, your margins and your timeline. You will leave with a realistic first trading date and a clear view of the work between here and there.
This page is general guidance and not advice on your brand’s specific position. Market and trading figures carry the period and scope they were measured on. Cdiscount’s own seller requirements, categories, commission rates and service standards change, so confirm anything programme-specific with Cdiscount or with us. Tax, product and producer responsibility rules differ by market and change, so talk to our compliance team about how they apply to your products before you make a filing, a registration or a launch decision.