Yandex, the Russian search giant, has launched an online marketplace for household services. The new platform encompasses a variety of services ranging from appliance repairs and installations, to home cleaning, computing assistance and courier services.
The marketplace lists service providers’ information, including their prices and client reviews. Consumers can leave their feedback and also rate the quality of the service they received.
The platform, called Yandex.Master, is currently available in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Yandex records no less than 800,000 search queries per month from the inhabitants of these two cities.
“Yandex.Master was designed to bring transparency, structure and safety to a chaotic market of private household services in Russia. Provider ratings and client feedback on the marketplace are expected to promote open competition, which in turn will organise service pricing and improve the quality of services in general,” the company states.
Yandex.Master also has a strict quality control system, which makes sure each service provider is vetted before their offer appears on the website. A quality control team makes trial service requests and manages negative feedback.
To begin with, the marketplace will partner with over 70 service providers and aggregators. Service providers will be able to promote their offers on the marketplace for free until 2015. At that point, Yandex may introduce a pay-per-lead model.
Among Yandex’s competitors in this field is Eruditor, a startup that helps users find hairdressers, fitness instructors, plumbers, or doctors via specialized service marketplaces. The company claims to have served nearly half a million users since its launch in 2007, and provided more than 100,000 professionals with over $200 million of revenues. Eruditor has raised more than $16 million in venture investment – the latest round having involved Intel Capital, Frontier Ventures, and Runa Capital in August 2013.
Another player is Youdo.com, a startup in which Moscow-based fund Flint Capital invested $1 million in October of last year.
Many online classifieds sites also have sub-segments where businesses and private individuals can offer services. Avito, Russia’s leading classifieds platform, has ‘Services Offered’ and ‘Services Wanted’ pages, although there are no detailed linked breakdowns of the type of service wanted or requested. Users can, however, use the search box to manually locate a specific post of interest.
Update: The Yandex.Market service was shut down in 2015
