Based on the course of e-commerce consolidation in the country, major national companies, which accounted for nearly a quarter of the market share in 2018, are expected to overtake roughly half of the market by 2023, with Yandex.Market and Beru as frontrunners. VKontakte (VK), founded in Saint Petersburg, was the most favored platform for social commerce by Russian e-shoppers in 2018. However, Instagram’s prospects were also promising. The most popular classified site Avito, which is the second biggest worldwide after Craigslist, hosted the largest share of C2C businesses during 2018.
Currently, the most sold product categories in Russian domestic and cross-border digital commerce were electronic appliances and apparel. Despite domestic e-commerce dominance as of 2019, cross-border online trade has been gaining its market share over the last years with China as the foremost supplier. Furthermore, rising e-commerce penetration rates steadily promoted growth of the online sales share in total retail sales. In 2018, the most frequent Russian online shoppers were aged from 23 to 36 years with the preference of doing their online purchases via desktop.
Positively developing Russian e-commerce exports marked an upswing in 2019, when the export value during the three quarters of 2019 outnumbered the export worth of the whole of 2018 by more than 20 percent. The largest turnover share from online exports came from Belarus in 2019, even though Russian online exporters’ principal target region was the United States.
As for logistics, delivery conditions proved to be strongly correlated with the likelihood of online purchases, as Russian online shoppers revealed a significant predilection for home and express delivery. In such terms, the Russian post fell behind online shops’ private delivery services, partly due to the extended delivery time frame of the package to the post office.
