How to sell if your product group is not on Yandex.Market?

    Foreword


    More than a year ago, I wrote a post “ Innoprom by the day ” and promised in it to lay out interesting cases from our practice further. The post turned out to be successful, it was immediately pulled out of the sandbox, they sent me invites for all Habr's projects, and as a result, I ended up in hardened ones. Only now I could not fulfill my promise for more than a year. I correct myself, I publish a description of the case, which was ready already a year and a half ago, but all hands did not reach.

    Why couldn’t I gather for a year and a half, and then suddenly ripened? Well, besides the fact that there was an hour of time for writing a post, there is still a reason. Yandex.Market is actively trying to transfer all stores to the Buy button on its site. And it turns out that they, frankly, not really. But PR and brainwashing on the topic of how cool it is for the stores is so much that he begins to feel sick. I decided to add them PR.

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    In fact, the picture was supposed to be written not on the website, but on the Market. Of course, we did not try to sell the elephant, but rather a human and understandable product: mattresses. Our client, Concord company»- one of the leaders in the Ural Federal District for the production of mattresses. In general, there are less and less regional solvent solvent clients. The local business either dies or is consumed by the feds. But the mattress market is an exception. The reason for this is complex logistics. The mattress is heavy and dimensional, it is difficult, long and expensive to carry in single copies from another region. Therefore, regional manufacturers still exist, although they are quite noticeably pushed by federal players.

    Two years ago, Concord came to us with the non-trivial task of doing Internet Marketing for them and building direct sales through the site. At first, the possibility of selling mattresses over the Internet was highly doubtful. Such goods are bought more alive, having felt and lain on it. But after seeing how aggressively the most evil competitors crush the Internet: Ascona and Ormatek, and also by measuring the number of orders per day on the websites of other manufacturers, we came to the conclusion that you can try.

    What to do when there is no money


    Of course, we didn’t have such budgets as the federals did. Even close. All regional customers against the background of the federals look like church mice. To make it clear how much money the feds poured into the promotion and what we had to compete with, I will give only one example.

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    Ascona posted a banner on the Yandex homepage. That is, they were not bothered at all to plant several million per month for advertising without any targeting and direct return. I also understand if this was some kind of mobile operator or Sberbank. But the mattresses, Karl!
    We could not afford this, so we began to look for some alternatives that could bring a maximum of money with a minimum of costs. Well, you understand, everything is as usual. Our clients have a very developed illusion that they can come to the Internet, invest three copecks and earn a billion. Nevertheless, they began to work.

    Come on, what does Yandex.Market have to do with it?


    I give. We tried almost everything: context, SEO, display banner, Avito, SMM, etc. By the way, mattresses are really sold on the Internet. In less than a year, we reached the level of a good showroom in a shopping center in terms of sales, while the total cost of launching a site is about three times less than opening a showroom and the monthly promotion budgets are also three times less than the cost of maintaining one showroom. I even made a presentation about all this and talked about October at the Internet Expo 2016. The case turned out to be interesting and rich.

    But most of all from my work, I remember our file with Yandex.Market. At the very beginning, we looked towards the Market and saw a very strange thing. There were no mattresses. More precisely, the mattresses were in the form of lines from store prices, but there were no normal product cards, reviews, or selection. There are telephones, tablets, televisions, but no mattresses. Moreover, the “mattress” requests per month are only 3-4 times less than the “smartphone”, as much as the “vacuum cleaner” and many times more than the “coffee machine”.

    And then a "brilliant" idea came into my bad head.
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    I thought that we need to convince Yandex that they add normal mattress cards to the Market. Obviously, the product group is in demand and cards are needed there. While competitors will figure out and place all their models as a vendor there, we will already be ahead of the rest, we will begin to collect traffic, get feedback from customers and make sales. At least 3-6 months we will have an advantage. A great idea for a not-so-narrow channel of attraction, I thought, and started to implement it.

    To begin with, they wrote an appeal to the Market with a proposal to add cards to this product category. Lightning fast got a response from a fool's assThe first line of technical support that there are no mattress cards and is not expected. The answer was expected, but I decided to have a snack. We wrote the text of a letter for Concord: a vendor’s appeal on how to place cards will be useful to everyone: consumers, manufacturers, and, of course, the Market itself, to cut more coupons from online stores. They convinced Concord to sign this letter and said where to send it. They themselves, through their Yandex manager, were asked to attach legs to this letter so that at least someone who can make a decision could read it. 2 days passed and we received from the same address from which the first answer was, a letter stating that the decision to place mattress cards was made, send all the data.

    Hurrah! Paul done. Shustrenko prepared a formalized description for all models, sent them to the Market. We wait. 2 weeks have passed, we are interested in when the mattress cards will appear in the catalog. We get a stunning answer: sit and wait while we collect data from most manufacturers. My whole “ingenious” idea immediately went bad. Naturally, we did not get any advantage. But there is nothing to do, here we could not move Yandex. Although the reasons for sitting and waiting for a lot of time I did not see point blank. Would post descriptions of mattresses as they become available. As a result, we waited for about 4 months, cards appeared in percent of 20 manufacturers.

    Further worse. Cards of mattresses appeared, but Market learned to disassemble the price forcemeat by no means immediately. Online stores out of habit unloaded the name of the mattress in one line, while the name of the brands could be in Russian, could be in English, the size could be two or three (still height). The size delimiter could be any. There were shorter cards, but prices did not normally get attached to them. Now the problem has been more or less combed, but not completely, until now prices from completely different models of mattress are sticking to some cards. About a year after creating the cards, we observed complete trash in this category, the same as before the cards appeared.

    And finally, there is still no way to sort mattresses by rating. That is, the Market sorts something, but it is completely not clear how a mattress without a single review may have the highest rating and what it generally is and how it was calculated.

    Epic fail? Maybe, but I don’t think so


    1. Of course, we did not achieve what we wanted, did not get any advantage over the feds, spent a lot of time communicating with Yandex, and it becomes more and more difficult in this regard every year. This is a minus.
    2. However, there are cards, and now, it is possible to monitor violations of established retail prices. True, our customer does it very unsystematically, but we are working on it. At least tracking unscrupulous stores has become easier.
    3. There was a good independent platform where the buyer can be invited to leave a review about the mattress. Well, potential buyers can read them.
    4. Strange, but despite the great demand, in this area the Market was not the best sales channel, unlike electronics. This is an experience.
    5.And finally, without this file there would not be this post :). So try non-standard moves and swim against the tide. At a minimum, you will get invaluable experience to share.

    PS Perhaps I’ll write the next post why I think that the Buy button on the Market will not take off as they plant it.

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