How to sell if your product group is not on Yandex.Market?

Foreword

More than a year ago I wrote the post “ Innoprom for rent ” and promised to spread interesting case studies from our practice further. The post turned out to be successful, it was immediately pulled out of the sandbox, sent me invites to all Habr projects, and in the end I got into zahabrennye. But I could not fulfill my promise for more than a year. Correcting, I publish the description of the case, which was already prepared a year and a half ago, but all hands did not reach.

Why a year and a half could not get together, and then suddenly ripe? Well, except that there was an hour of time to write a post, there is another reason. Yandex.Market is actively trying to transplant all the stores to the “Buy” button on its site. And it turns out they have, frankly, not very. But PR and brainwashing on how great it is for stores already so much that he begins to feel sick. I decided to add them PR.



In fact, the picture should have been written not “on the site”, but “on the Market”. We, of course, did not try to sell the elephant, but quite a human and understandable product: mattresses. Our client, Concorde , is one of the leaders in the Ural Federal District for the production of mattresses. In general, regional solvent sane customers every year becomes less and less. The local business is either dying or is being devoured by the feds. But the mattress market is an exception. The reason for this is complex logistics. The mattress is heavy and overall, it is difficult, long and expensive to carry in single copies from another region. Therefore, regional producers still exist, although they are quite noticeably tightened by federal players.
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Two years ago, Concord came to us with a non-trivial task to make Internet Marketing for them and rebuild direct sales through the site. At first, the possibility of selling mattresses over the Internet was in great doubt. Such goods are bought more alive, feeling and lying on it. But looking at how the most evil competitors aggressively put pressure on the Internet: Ascona and Ormatek, as well as measuring the number of orders per day on websites of other manufacturers, came to the conclusion that you can try.

What to do when there is no money

Of course, we didn’t have such budgets as the feds. Even close. All regional customers on the background of the feds look like church mice. To make it clear how much money the feds poured into the promotion and with what we had to compete, I’ll give just one example.



Ascona placed a banner on the main page of Yandex. That is, they were not at all bothered to plant several million per month on advertising without any targeting and direct returns. I still understand if it was some mobile operator or Sberbank. But mattresses, Karl!
We could not afford it, so we began to look for some alternatives that could bring the most money at the lowest cost. Well, you understand, everything is as usual. Our clients have a very strong illusion that you can come to the Internet, invest three pennies and earn a billion. But nevertheless began to work.

Come on in short, what does Yandex.Market have to do with it?

I give. We tried almost everything: context, SEO, context-based banner, Avito, SMM, etc. By the way, mattresses are really sold over the Internet. In less than a year, in terms of sales volume, we reached the level of a good salon in a shopping center, while the total cost of launching the site is about three times less than opening a salon and monthly promotion budgets are also three times less than the cost of maintaining one salon. I even gave a presentation about all this and told October at the Internet Expo 2016 exhibition. The case turned out to be interesting and rich.

But most of all from all the work I remember our file with Yandex.Market. At the very beginning we looked in the direction of Market and saw a very strange thing. Mattresses were not there. More precisely, the mattresses there were in the form of lines from the price lists of stores, but there were no product cards, no reviews, no selection of normal ones. There are telephones, there are tablets, there are TVs, but there are no mattresses. At the same time, “mattress” requests are only 3-4 times less per month than a “smartphone”, as many as a “vacuum cleaner” and many times more than a “coffee machine”.

And then a “brilliant” idea came into my bad head.


I thought that we need to convince Yandex that they add normal mattress cards to the Market. It is obvious that the product group is in demand and need cards there. As long as the competitors figure out and place all their models there as a vendor, we will already be ahead of the rest of the world, start collecting traffic, get feedback from customers and make sales. At least 3-6 months we will have an advantage. Great idea for not the narrowest channel of attraction, I thought, and began to implement it.

To begin with, they wrote to the Market an appeal with the proposal to add cards to this product category. Lightning-fast received a response from the ass-fool of the first line of technical support, that there are no mattress cards and is not expected. The answer was expected, but I decided to have a snack. They wrote the text of the letter for Concord: addressing the vendor on how to place cards will be useful to everyone: consumers, manufacturers and, of course, the Market itself to cut more coupons from online stores. They convinced Concord to sign this letter and said where to send. Through their Yandex manager, they themselves asked to attach legs to this letter so that at least one person who can make a decision read it. Two days passed and we received a letter from the same address from which the first reply was received, stating that the decision to place mattress cards was made, send all the data.

Hooray! The floor is done. Shustrenko prepared a formalized description for all models, sent them to the Market. We wait. 2 weeks have passed, we are interested in when the mattress cards will appear in the catalog. We get a stunning answer: sit and wait while we collect data from most manufacturers. My whole "brilliant" idea was immediately rotten. Naturally, we received no advantage. But there is nothing to do, Yandex could not be moved here. Although I did not see any reason to sit and wait for a lot of time. Would place descriptions of mattresses as they become available. As a result, we waited about 4 months, the cards appeared in 20 percent of manufacturers.

Further - worse. Cards of mattresses appeared, but the market did not immediately learn how to disassemble the price stuffing. Online stores out of habit unloaded the name of the mattress in one line, while the name of the brands could be in Russian, could be in English, the size could be two or three (another height). The size separator could be any. In short, the cards were, and the prices were not normally attached to them. Now the problem has more or less been combed, but not completely, so far prices for completely different models of mattresses have been sticking to some cards. About a year after the creation of the cards, we saw a complete trash in this category, the same as before the appearance of the cards.

Finally, there is still no way to sort the mattresses by rating. That is, the Market sorts something, but it is not at all clear how a mattress without a single review can have the highest rating and what kind of rating it is.

Epic fail? Perhaps, but I do not think so

1. Of course, we didn’t achieve what we wanted, didn’t get any advantage over the feds, spent a lot of time communicating with Yandex, and it becomes more difficult in this regard every year. This is a minus.
2. However, there are cards, and now, it is possible to monitor violations of established retail prices. True, our customer does this very unsystematically, but we are working on it. At the very least, tracking unscrupulous stores has become easier.
3. There was a good independent platform where the buyer can be invited to leave feedback about the mattress. Well, potential buyers can read them.
4. Strange, but in spite of the great demand, on this topic, the Market turned out to be far from the best sales channel, unlike electronics. This is an experience.
5. And finally, without this file there would not be this post :). So try non-standard moves and swim against the current. At a minimum, you will gain invaluable experience to share.

PS Perhaps the next post I will write why I believe that the "Buy" button on the Market will not fly up in the form that they implant.