Russia's top five e-commerce platforms compete with each other, which one has more advantages?

According to a recent survey conducted by Data Insight on Russian e-commerce sellers, 89% of respondents said they had increased sales through e-commerce platforms in the past year , and 58% of sellers had a significant increase in sales.

In addition to reaching more potential customers and improving sales performance, sellers join e-commerce platforms for other reasons: expanding sales coverage, increasing visibility, and reducing sales costs (referring to moving from offline to online).

In addition, sellers are not limited to one platform , they try different platforms to diversify their sales channels. Data shows that each seller interviewed has settled in 2-3 e-commerce platforms on average. With so many platforms, how can you find the right one for you?

Data Insight took five major e-commerce platforms, including Wildberries, Ozon, AliExpress Russia, Yandex.Market and Goods, as research objects, and analyzed three aspects of data: the number of sellers on each platform, the commission ratio and the product categories suitable for sales . New and old sellers in the Russian market can refer to this.

Number of sellers on each platform

1. Wildberries : 91,000 sellers (as of January 2021)

2. AliExpress Russia: 35,000 sellers (as of January 2021, only Russian sellers are counted)

3. Ozon : 18,000 sellers (as of September 2020)

4. Goods : 8,000 sellers (as of January 2021)

5. Yandex.Market : 7,300 sellers (as of January 2021)

Commission ratio of each platform

There is no free lunch in the world, and everyone needs to "eat". While enjoying the convenience and traffic brought by e-commerce platforms, sellers also need to pay commissions to the platforms.

48% of respondents believe that the cost of selling through the platform is comparable to the cost of selling through other channels. For these five platforms, the commission rate ranges from 3% to 22% , and the commissions charged by different categories are also different. For specific information, please refer to the data compiled by the editor:

Commission policies of various platforms

Commission ratios for different categories on each platform

From the above two sets of data, we can see that the commission policies of AliExpress Russia and Yandex.Market are quite attractive. Data Insight believes that under the "temptation" of low commissions, sellers from Wildberries and Ozon will flock to the former two.

However, although Wildberries has no advantage in terms of commission, as a Russian e-commerce giant, the exposure and traffic it brings to sellers are unmatched by other platforms. Therefore, many sellers have plans to settle in Wildberries. Sellers who have already settled in use Wildberries as their main position and settle in Ozon as an additional channel.

Categories suitable for sale on each platform

In general, electronic products (light gray area in Figure 4), clothing, shoes and accessories (light purple area in Figure 4) are the categories that buyers pay the most attention to.

Bar chart of the attention level of different categories on each platform (based on the analysis of product access data on each platform in the first half of 2020)

I have said before that electronic products and clothing have always been popular categories in Russian e-commerce. Data from various platforms also confirm this.

Top five most popular categories on each platform

Data Insight also surveyed sellers on which platforms are more suitable for different categories . The details are as follows (the higher the proportion, the more suitable it is) :

1. Clothing, shoes and accessories: Wildberries (81%), AliExpress (50%)

2. Electronics and home appliances: Yandex.Market (70%), AliExpress (69%), Goods (66%), Ozon (66%)

3. Sporting goods: Wildberries (58%), AliExpress (55%), Ozon (50%)

4. Home goods: AliExpress (65%), Ozon (65%), Wildberries (61%)

5. Automotive products: AliExpress (47%), Ozon (43%), Goods (42%)

6. Cosmetics: Wildberries (63%), Ozon (45%)

After reading this, I believe that sellers have a deeper understanding of these platforms. But remember that no platform is the best, and everyone can make comprehensive considerations based on their own situation.

Russia