Data Insight, a reputable Moscow-based research agency, and Ruward, a publisher of industry rankings, have just published the 2016 “E-Commerce Index TOP-100.” This index ranks Russian e-commerce sites by sales volumes, number of orders, average order value and other criteria, over the course of 2015.
Leading the ranking is Ulmart, a St. Petersburg based online retailer which has developed an original online-offline model and intends to go public this or next year. (The sales volume estimate does not take into account the Ulmart’s ‘Cybermarkets.’)
KupiVip.ru, a leading flash sales platform backed by western investors, jumped to 8th place (compared with 31st in 2014), following a prosperous year which saw group sales increase by 50%.
Lamoda.ru, a footwear site launched by Rocket Internet in 2011, did not do so well. Its $202 million sales volume in 2015 was no more sufficient to secure its presence in the Top 10, believe Data Insight analysts.
Methodology
Data Insight says that it has used advanced monitoring and measurement methods to complete this research, and that the concerned companies were invited to check and comment on the numbers.
The ranking only includes companies whose e-commerce activities in Russia are run by a legal entity registered in the country. Marketplaces, which the researchers have defined as sites where sales, or the major part of them, are made by third parties, are on their part excluded from the ranking.
This is why key players such as eBay, Yandex.Market and Wikimart, as well as China’s AliExpress and JD.COM, are not integrated in the ranking.
Data Insight counted only online sales. Thus the sales generated by Ulmart’s ‘Cybermarkets’ were not included, since these sales involve an important offline dimension. As a result, a 36.8 billion ruble sales volume is attributed to the company, even though its total sales, including the ‘Cybermarkets,’ amounted to 62.7 billion last year.
Most importantly, the ranking concerns e-commerce sites, not companies. Thus, the online sales activities of Otto Group, for example, are not ranked as such, but are classified via the group’s distinct brand sites BonPrix.ru, Otto.ru and Quelle.ru.
Top 25 Russian e-commerce sites in 2015
Sources: Data Insight, Ruward. See the full ranking (100 sites) in Russian here.
Market trends
In 2015, Russia’s domestic online retail market still grew in real terms amid the crisis (see EWDN’s e-commerce report).
Russian e-commerce grew in rubles, reaching some 650 billion (+16%) as far as physical goods were concerned, according to Data Insight, while the inflation rate did not exceed 13%.
Given the ruble’s sharp depreciation, the picture looks darker in dollars: market size fell to $10.5 billion for physical goods, down 28% from 2014. (These numbers do not include cross-border orders, deliveries of ready meals as well as corporate, C2C, MLM and group purchases.)
A considerable growth potential is still ahead, however, since online retail accounts for just 2% of Russia’s total retail market.
Meanwhile, cross-border purchases continued to grow rapidly in 2015. Their value amounted to some $3.4 billion, up from $2.2 billion in 2014. However, only Chinese players, which saw their share of the cross-border flows jump to some 80%, benefited from this growth, while the activity of western merchants was severely hit by the ruble’s depreciation.
