In its pledge to reduce pollution, Paris, city of the COP21, set different regulations to motivate Parisian car owners to switch for a cleaner alternative. But Ecotaxes, higher parking charges and regular gas price increases have resulted in lower purchasing power of many car owners, making it even harder for them to switch to an alternative. Seeing this as an opportunity to develop its business out of the Netherlands, Veloretti, a small Amsterdam-based bike manufacturer and online retailer set out to help these million of Parisians to switch to a cheaper and cleaner alternative: a Veloretti bike. Paris being a minor market for Veloretti in 2018, the business objective was increasing the sales by at least 300% to cover media budget investment. The second objective was environmentally led: By encouraging car owners to switch to bike to commute, Veloretti was hoping to significantly reduce pollution in Paris.

While Paris is making lives of car owners harder and harder, Veloretti wanted to get their attention by being the first to help them with a sales campaign.

On Car-Free Day in Paris (16th September) we turned 5 million Parisian car license plates into a promo code offering car owners a cheaper bike on veloretti.com. Not all the plates were granting the same discount. Fetching the french car plates database with an API, the website granted a bigger discount to car owners of old and environmentally unfriendly cars. From a 5% percents for an electric Toyota Yaris to up to 35% for a Diesel Mercedes Class M from 2003, the promo was favouring those who really needed it. Therefore, the promo was designed to turn those who pollute the most into those who pollute the least.

To gather data about the entered vehicle, we developed a Shopify script capable to connect with the French License Plates database.

It allowed us to fetch specific data about the register vehicle. Model, horsepower, year of manufacture, type of fuel… From there, we could then estimate each car’s emission and adjust the discount offered to the user accordingly.

For instance, the discount would have been 5% percents for an electric Toyota Yaris and up to 35% for a Diesel Mercedes Class M from 2003.

We developed a Shopify extension that connects our store to the French license plate API in order to verify the entered numbers and region vehicle comes from. Algorithm also fetched more specific data like model, year of manufacture, type of fuel and average consumption of the registered vehicle, which allowed it to calculate different discounts based on cars pollution contribution.

The campaign was started on the Paris Car-Free day - 16th of September - and was running until the end of the European Mobility Week, closing on the 25th of September at midnight.

French visitors were automatically redirected to the French version of our website where they inserted licence plate number in the checkout and got offered the calculated discount.

Only people having a car registered in Paris and its suburbs could benefit of the promo, which represents more or less 5 million promo codes for 5 million cars.

In only 1 week, CAR 2 BIKE has increased the number of Parisian visitors by 1320% compared to the week before, jumping from 509 to 6719 unique visitors per week.

Bikes’ sales in the Greater Paris have increased by 2770% compared to the week before, going from 10 bikes sold to 277 bikes, our sales in Paris went up from 3700€ to 81.992€. This turned France into Veloretti’s most performing market for the first time in its history.

With the average discount granted on our website and social media investment of 1500€ in mind, our gross profit per week increased for 2352%.

Last but not least, CAR 2 BIKE has turned 277 cars into bike which can potentially prevents the emission of 194 tons/CO2 per year just within the greater Paris.