Good morning to all of you, and thank you very much for joining this call to present Maisons du Monde Q3 and nine months 2023 sales. I am with our CEO, François-Melchior de Polignac, and Gilles Lemaire, acting CFO, who will be making today's presentation. It will be followed by a Q&A session. You have no doubt seen the press release we issued this morning. The conference call slide can be downloaded from and viewed on our website, corporate.maisonsdumonde.com. This call is also being audio webcast, and a replay will be available on our website later today. All listeners are reminded to read the forward-looking disclaimer on slide two. I will now turn the call over to François-Melchior de Polignac.
Thank you very much, Carole. Good morning, everyone. I hope you are all doing well. We'll be sharing with you our usual Q3 sales reporting. Of course, a lot of this has been disclosed already a couple of weeks ago, so after a quick introduction, Gilles will walk you through the detailed Q3 numbers fairly quickly. Then I'll give you a bit more granularity around some of the initiatives we have taken within the framework of the 3 C Plan to adjust to the current environment before opening it up for Q&A. Let's begin on slide five, which is really meant to set the scene on what happened in the past quarter.
As I explained 15 days ago, we had seen a significant inflection in the consumption environment after July, with consumer confidence deteriorating after almost a year of positive momentum, and obviously, discretionary spend bearing most of the impact. I will not dwell on the drivers in consumer sentiment, as a number of players, directly or indirectly exposed to European retail, have been commenting on this backdrop for the past 2 weeks. So that's what drove the 9.4 decline in sales and the adjustment of our annual objectives on October ninth. The real questions at this point for us are, A, what are the lessons learned in terms of our own performance in this environment? What are the pockets of resilience or underperformance we have identified as the case may be?
And B, how do we respond by acting upon the levers we control, which again, is taking us back to the 3C Plan, i.e., consumers, cost, and cash. In that spirit, I will now hand over to Gilles to share the details of our third quarter sales before coming back and giving you more color on the initiatives on the way to adapt the organization to this new environment.
Thank you very much, FM, and good morning to everyone. Great to be with you today to present our Q3 figures and answer all your questions. FM has already set the backdrop, and on slide seven, you can see how that translated. As shown on the bridge, at EUR 252 million, Q3 sales were down -9.4% versus same period last year. This includes a EUR 2.5 million net positive impact from stores open or closed since Q3 last year. I suggest turning to slide eight to have an overview of our store network. Over the quarter, we continued our active store network management. At the end of September 2023, Maisons du Monde operated 344 owned stores, compared to 358 at the end of December 2022.
Since Q2 2023, we successfully tested the transfer of 3 stores in France to the affiliate model, and here, too, we will continue the rollout going forward. 2 additional stores will be transferred by year-end, as already communicated in Q2 announcement. For the sake of clarity, let me remind you that in our affiliation model, our partners fund the CapEx while we finance the inventory. This is, for us, an efficient CapEx and free cash flow operational model. So let's move now to the details of our sales performance by channel, category, and country. I'm not going to go through this line by line, but let me just share a few high-level observations. First, the relative resilience in our domestic French market compared to international is clearly one of the highlights.
Obviously, the shift in consumer sentiment in inflationary pressures have been less impacting in France than in other European markets. But unsurprisingly, we are also benefiting from our greater scale and brand visibility to absorb some of the consumer headwinds we have been facing. Second, when you look at international as a whole, the performance is actually quite contrasted between the larger markets, such as Spain and to a lesser extent, Italy, versus some of our smaller geographies. The continuous growth in the marketplace is also acting as a buffer here. Obviously, discontinuation of the UK online operations impacting our sales by -EUR 2.2 million is an additional headwind to overall international performance. Third observation, we haven't really witnessed any major divergence between furniture and decoration. As you can see, at -9.6% and -9.1%. The overall trends are very close.
Also, there were some well-identified underperforming families, such as textile. I also wanted to comment on the online performance. You see sales down -12.4%, which is a 420 bips gap versus in-store sales. But once again, there is more to this story, and the reality is that the performance is very mixed between geographies. In France, for instance, and even without taking into account the marketplace growth contribution, in-store and online were actually quite close, circa 100 bips. So the underperformance in online sales is really concentrated on the international business, notably Germany, as highlighted on the slide. Last but not least, the growth of the marketplace is actually continuing on a steady pace, with GMV growing by +30%. It thus remains a growth factor moving forward. This concludes the key point of our quarterly sales.
I will now hand over to FM to present the actions of our 3C Plan.
Thank you, Gilles. Turning now to slide 11, I will comment on the actions of our 3C Plan that we are both reinforcing and accelerating for Q4. These actions are helping us mitigate the impact of a soft consumption environment on our performance. Let's start with some examples of what we do for customers. First, we are strongly reinforcing our Q4 commercial plan with upcoming new and distinctive initiatives to adapt to consumer behavior and to drive traffic. Second, we are now launching a large commercial initiative to free up the stores of slow-moving SKUs, both to generate traffic and to improve shelf visibility of faster-moving SKUs for our customers. Third, elaborating on first price adjustments this year, we are adding another batch of tactical price reductions on selected items.
Fourth, a very emblematic initiative is a return of the catalog in-store, a very powerful sales tool that is highly appreciated by both our customers but also by our store teams. We also have a number of more local actions. Let me give you just one example, that of Switzerland. In this country, we had a specific price challenge linked to the Swiss franc-euro conversion rate, so we are adapting our pricing there. Let me turn now to the second C, cost. As I said in my introductory remarks, Maisons du Monde is managing revenue while streamlining its cost base. To do so, we are acting simultaneously on three fronts: further reducing head office costs. We are indeed further downsizing our central organization at headquarters level and also reducing rental costs.
For instance, we announced the closing of our offices in Le Château, the historical, emblematic part of our head office in Nantes. At store level, we are further optimizing work hours while protecting the key commercial moments of the end of the year. We are also further streamlining priorities and projects with a laser-focused approach on return on investment, freezing non-essential travels, accelerating the closing of last negotiations affecting Q4 cost base. These actions will allow Maisons du Monde to achieve an additional EUR 10 million in cost savings, raising our target for the year to EUR 35 million. And last but not least, the third C, cash. As already mentioned, we are further streamlining priorities and projects. This will also allow us to limit our CapEx to circa EUR 40 million this year.
But we are also maximizing cash with an even closer management of inventory, and in parallel, we pursue our negotiations with all suppliers to improve payment terms. As you can see, we are all focusing strictly on Q4, and the full mobilization of the organization will help us secure our full year adjusted guidance. This concludes our presentation. Thank you very much for your attention, and of course, Gilles and I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone. We currently have no telephone questions.
I see a question here about the mid-range and what we can do to address the drop in consumption and so forth. Well, Maisons du Monde is inspiring and yet accessible, clearly, and this is something that we know works when we manage to stick to it. So thank you for your question, Laura Paz. It is true that in this period of high inflation and high pressure on the purchasing power, it's probably more difficult to make it seeable for the customers, the accessibility of the range offer. But indeed, this is where we do see the impact of the commercial initiatives that we put into place.
When I'm speaking about commercial initiatives, I'm focusing here on the promotion that we clearly increased this year compared to last year, and it's still a driver, which is important in this difficult consumption environment. Also, as we mentioned, we do also have a real interest in making some targeted and tactical price reductions that do meet with a significant interest on the part of customers. I see a second question online, which is: where are you regarding the CFO recruitment? Also, quite a good question, and of course, something which is very important to us. I would just first remind you of what I said last time, which is that we organize ourselves internally to be able to face all our challenges and all our calendars in terms of finance.
So this is why Gilles is with us, and Gilles has been in the company for a while now and is, of course, extremely well positioned to keep the position as an interim. And we also reinforce the teams so that he would be able to do that in a more, let's say, focused way. So the organization is suited to the coming moments of communication, of budgeting, and so on and so on, and we are well advanced in our recruitment process for the last part of the question.
Thank you. There are still no telephone questions.
So this may be not a big surprise because, of course, most information was shared two weeks ago. So if there is no further question, I see no written question. If there is no further question coming on the phone, we will, we will, call it a day and, say, see you next time with the next financial communication.