E-commerce trends: Foreign players come to Russia

Recently, we wrote about the fact that the Russian e-commerce market is quite interesting for foreign players, and talked about how Russian internette shops (especially small ones) could counter threats from abroad. Recently it became known that the largest player in the global ecommerce market, eBay, has entered into a partnership agreement with Wikimart. The goal of cooperation is to accelerate the delivery of goods to Russian clients of the company.

The director of eBay operations in Russia, Yevgeny Tikhomirov, told Vedomosti that in the near future, a warehouse in Latvia will work, where sellers of goods on eBay from all over the world will be able to store goods as close as possible to buyers. This is advantageous in terms of logistics and reducing delivery time.

“It is more profitable from the point of view of logistics and will speed up delivery for buyers. There are plans for the same warehouse in Russia, because depending on the value of the goods and its weight, the characteristics of its transportation, it is more profitable to keep some goods in Russia than to send them from abroad, Tikhomirov said. “An example would be televisions — a heavy, big product that is very expensive to ship in regular packages.”

This project is implemented in conjunction with Wikimart. The warehouse area in Latvia will be 5 thousand square meters. It is planned to spend up to $ 5 million on the project. This is how Maxim Faldin, CEO of Wikimart described the scheme of work:
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As a pilot project, we sell Chinese merchandise to Russian consumers. Wikimart acts as an organizer and operator, the sellers are Chinese partners, and both Wikimart and eBay will be the trading platform.

32% of all purchases by Russian eBay users are made by Chinese sellers, while, according to Vladimir Dolgov, general director of eBay in Russia, about 32-35% of Russian orders on eBay are electronics and household appliances. The volume of orders processed by eBay from Russian users in 2012 exceeded $ 400 million. According to Enter, the turnover of cross-border e-commerce for 2013 amounted to 100-120 billion rubles, or 20% of all Russian e-commerce.

What to do online shopping

The experience of cooperation even of such large online retail players suggests that in order to survive in competition with them, smaller online stores must optimize their processes and raise the level of service.

In general, in order to be able to compete with well-known ecommerce brands like Amazon and eBay, the online store should work in the following directions:

• Expansion of the range of goods (including through special portals of suppliers).
• The introduction of automated tools that increase sales (product recommendations - here is an interesting thread on this topic)
• Logistics optimization.
• Improve usability and site design .
• Cost reduction.
• The use of non-standard moves .
• Analytics and hypothesis testing .

The main goal of all this one - to reduce costs. Indeed, without this, Russian players will not be able to offer a lower price for popular goods than foreign competitors. After all, as said in the comments to one of our topics:

As long as the Russian huckster will turn 200-300% compared with the same pumps and Amazons, no expansion of the range will help.

It is difficult to argue with this, and you need to try with all your might to change the situation, not relying only on the help of the Russian legislators .