Internet distribution is a new concept in the Russian market

In our country, the retail e-commerce industry has been developing for more than ten years. The growth of this direction is obvious. The turnover and the number of players in this field of activity is increasing. It comes large investments. There are brands and companies with numerous staff. This becomes a noticeable fact in the development of the economy.
This type of activity, like online sales, makes online stores withstand intense workloads. We have to develop new types of advertising, develop IT directions. In online commerce, standards have been established for working with customers, standards for interfaces, and there are many platforms designed to simplify the creation of online stores.

However, there are companies that are closely associated with online sales, but are developing technologically much slower than online stores. These are distribution companies - suppliers of goods. Their slow technological development is a narrow neck in the development of e-commerce. The reason for this is the principle of the work of online stores with suppliers. It is very different from the principle of the usual distributor customers - retail chains, dealers and sub-dealers. Online stores do not buy goods in their warehouse, but work from the warehouse of the wholesaler. This entails a huge number of operational tasks that must be addressed by online stores and distributors:

• the online store needs to find out whether the distributor has the goods in stock for each received order, and the distributor must respond to each such request;
• a product that is not enough in stock, the online store asks to reserve, and the distributor must put it in reserve, noting in its ERP;
• Every day, the online store must compile a register of orders (a list of goods that it wants to ship the next day) and send the corresponding register to each distributor. Distributor must register each register in ERP and issue an invoice;
• Every day, the online store should know the status of orders containing goods that were not available. For example, goods in transit and will be in 3 days, or goods in stock, you can pick up.
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In this case, the simplest interaction between the distributor and the online store is described. Different types of prices for goods and various delivery conditions are not taken into account. As you see, a wholesale company needs to have a significantly larger number of personnel involved in order processing than to work with a regular sales channel to work with online stores. After all, usually a dealer (not an online store) orders goods in much larger quantities and makes it 7-10 times less. In addition, it is necessary to train staff to work with online stores. Far from all wholesale companies go for it, as a result, online stores have a very narrow choice of suppliers. Solving the problem of interaction with online stores without increasing the staff is possible, but at the same time distributors need to radically reconsider their view of sales organization.

We believe that the future of this direction is in Internet distribution. This is a new class of online stores, designed for the sale of goods not by the retail consumer, but by online stores as final customers. We did not immediately come to the definition of “internet distribution”. We tried to call the results of our activity by different names: “wholesale online stores”, “B2B e-commerce systems”, “B2B wholesale systems”, etc. Now we are sure that the name makes it as clear as possible why our solutions are needed.