One of the largest online retailers in Russia, Wildberries, has entered the Ukrainian market. The company has deployed a partner network of points of issue of orders from 8 thousand objects and launched a website on a local domain. Development in this country could cost the company $ 7 million. However, Russian roots can be a serious obstacle for the company, market participants warn: Ukrainian nationalists are still hostile to Russian entrepreneurs. Most likely, they will have to carry out logistics and business management from a third country, they assume.
The fact that the online retailer Wildberries has begun to work in the Ukrainian market was reported to Kommersant in the company’s press service. The marketplace will work through wildberries.ua, more than 3 million items of goods from 32 thousand brands are already available for consumers there. We are talking about women’s, men’s and children’s clothing, shoes and accessories, as well as toys, sports goods, stationery, pet supplies, goods for the home and garden. Delivery is carried out through logistics partners, the company explains, 8 thousand partner points of issue are already connected to the network. Ukraine for Wildberries is the eighth country of presence; in addition to her and Russia, she works in Poland, Slovakia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.
A Kommersant source from a number of Russian retailers working in Ukraine says that nationalist sentiments in the country are still strong and everything that concerns Russian brands is perceived as unambiguously hostile.
“It is believed that this is work for the enemy army. Local nationalists can come to the store with automatic machines and block the work of the outlet. So, Sberbank was forced to leave the country, we changed the structure of work, made it international and manage a subdivision from a third country, “says the source of Kommersant.
From the point of view of the corporate structure, Wildberries will have to organize work through a foreign office, agrees Mikhail Burmistrov, general director of Infoline-Analytics: “In this case, it would be more logical to build a long route through Poland”.
The border between Russia and Ukraine does not work, the Kommersant source continues, the work of their network is built through the port in Odessa, where goods come from China or the EU, but not from Russia.
Withdrawing money from the country will also be problematic, he adds.
Wildberries have to develop their own storage facilities, it will be difficult to work without them, suggests Mikhail Burmistrov. Taking into account partner pickup points, the expert estimates, investments in expansion in the Ukrainian market can amount to up to $ 7 million, taking into account the opening of a sorting center, organization of an office and a local contact center.
Ukraine is the second market after Russia in terms of the number of potential consumers in the former Soviet Union, recalls co-founder of Data Insight Boris Ovchinnikov.
At the same time, there are already players on the Ukrainian e-commerce market that buyers associate with Russia, for example, Lamoda, so Wildberries will not be a pioneer in this sense.
However, Lamoda’s success in the Ukrainian market is rather modest, he notes. “About 2 million visits per month, according to SimilarWeb: this is about the same as lamoda.by, and not much more than lamoda.kz, although the population of Belarus and Kazakhstan is much smaller,” comments Mr. Ovchinnikov.
Wildberries – a major participant in Russian e-commerce, according to its own data, in the second quarter of 2020, the company’s turnover grew by 123%, to 103.4 billion rubles. As of September, it has over 17 thousand of its own and partner points of issue of orders, including Sberlogistics postamates. The company’s audience includes about 30 million registered users; in 2019, the turnover amounted to 223.5 billion rubles.
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