Who does and will do online shopping in Russia?

Every day new online stores appear in Russia. At the same time, creating even a small online store is a rather difficult task. At a conference held this month by the information portal Oborot.ru, it was reported that in 2011 more than $ 1 billion was invested in the Russian e-commerce market. And this investment is equal to the amount of investment in the US e-commerce market.

So who gets these investments in Russia?

Basically, all funds go to the maintenance and development of existing Russian projects.

Here are the most famous of them:
sapato.ru
ozon.ru
lamoda.ru
kupivip.ru
enter.ru
utinet.ru
wikimart.ru
homeme.ru
sotmarket.ru

Who creates new online stores?

1. Projects already working and making money. Attract investments from Russian and Western funds for the development and maintenance of expensive back-office. The costs for which are huge and often comparable to income. But no one is looking at income yet - everyone is trying to grab a larger piece of the already growing pie.

2. Money is given to teams with experience in creating e-commerce projects, which on various conditions “pick up” the project and give it to the customer. Moreover, the project does not have a founder as such, and this adversely affects its results.

3. Large network companies that have free funds for new projects, as well as back office and network infrastructure.

Here are some examples:

• X5 RETAIL GROUP created the E5 order table project . This is an online store that allows you to pick up orders yourself in the X5 Retail Group distribution network. The catalog of this online store contains more than 400 thousand products.
• HOFF is a chain of hypermarkets selling goods like home & dekor. Promotes its online hypermarket hoff.ru
• M. Video - the site of this retail chain has long been the largest online store of household appliances.
• MediaMarkt has also recently opened online sales.

4. Distributors and manufacturers open online stores in order to sell goods at retail. For them it is easier than for everyone else, the goods are already in stock. Plus, there is a significant amount of resources for creating an online platform.

Examples of famous projects:

• Citilink Electronic Discounter is a project of a major distributor of MERLION computer equipment .
• The company Posuda.ru is the largest wholesaler of tableware with its online stores.

5. Young entrepreneurs. There is less and less chance of creating a profitable online store and having good growth without significant investment. Previously, you could find an exclusive product or market niche. Now it’s quite complicated, all the main categories of goods are sold by large online stores. They have good conditions when working with suppliers, can buy goods at their warehouse, respectively, give a lower price and provide better service.

What are we observing:
A huge increase in the number of very small online stores is a one-day activity that entrepreneurs are starting to do, who believe that you can create an online store for 30,000-60,000 rubles and earn stable 20-100 thousand rubles a month. This is not to mention those who want to spend a smaller amount. Most of them do not understand the main thing that the bulk of the money when creating an online store will have to spend on a back office. Creating an online store without a clear understanding of what this business is (for example, due to the experience of working in an online store) and without a cash pillow of a million rubles is extremely risky.

We consider the fact of almost complete indifference to electronic commerce of those who have the very millions to turn them into billions to be the most interesting.
The largest enterprises and distributors are in no hurry to go online. The main reasons for this are the older generation of managers who are very poorly versed in technology and the lack of fierce competition that would force them to begin to understand.

When the players using Internet technologies and business process automation systems begin to oust the “dinosaurs” from the market, then the most interesting thing will begin :) We
observe, analyze, and participate ...