Russia's largest e-commerce company WB enters the US, but netizens are arguing

According to foreign media reports, Russia's largest e-commerce platform Wildberries (hereinafter referred to as WB) announced its entry into the US B2C market. Its US site us.wildberries.ru has been launched, supporting both Russian and English languages. It has also launched mobile applications that support iOS and Android systems.

WB US has 5.5 million products from more than 40,000 brands, and WB plans to continue to expand the product range, including products in the high-end market.

Regarding WB's opening of a US site, some Russian netizens said that the domain name of the US site is a bit "confusing" because the suffix is ​​still the Russian domain name .ru.

Russians also have different views on WB's entry into the United States.

The opposing party believes that foreigners will not buy things on WB. In the comment section of a forum post, a Russian netizen said: "If I were an American, I would not buy anything here. Russians are 'swindlers.'" This comment caused a huge uproar and received hundreds of replies.

The supporters believe that WB's products have a price advantage over Amazon. For example, the same set of Lego toys costs 18.99 euros on Amazon, while WB only sells it for 13.37 euros. In response, the opponents said that this is just a coincidence and that Amazon will also have lower prices when doing promotions.

The heated discussion is likely due to the fact that Tatyana Bakalchuk, the founder of WB, had previously publicly declared war on Amazon. The outside world had always thought that WB just wanted to compete with Amazon in the European market, but it turned out that WB had directly opened a US site. One netizen joked: "Tomorrow's news headlines will be that Amazon acquired WB."

Some people think that WB is "asking for trouble" by entering the US market, and suggest that WB enter the Chinese market. In response, netizens said: "Buying goods from China and then selling them to the Chinese?" I'm afraid they are just idle.

Although people are not optimistic about WB's expansion into the Russian overseas market, everything still depends on the actual situation. Public data shows that in 2020, the cross-border export turnover of sellers on the WB platform increased by 95% year-on-year to 23.7 billion rubles (about 2 billion yuan). At the same time, sales increased by 138% year-on-year.

Today, WB's business has expanded to 14 countries around the world , including Russia, Germany, Poland, Israel, Slovakia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, France, Italy, Spain, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and the United States where a new site has been opened.

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