On the orders of President Putin, Russia’s Ministry of Economy has drafted plans for the development of a ‘Russian Alibaba‘ e-commerce aggregator site to boost domestic and cross-border online sales of Russian goods. The site would act as a one-stop shop for several existing Russian e-commerce sites including Yandex, Yulmart and Wikimart.
In a document entitled E-commerce as a driver of development stakeholders in small and medium-sized businesses in the domestic and foreign markets that was published this week, the Ministry lays out its plans for a “single exporter environment” that would provide the customs, logistics, information, payment, credit, insurance and other services necessary for the sale of goods through e-commerce both at home and abroad.
According to the Ministry, only around 16,000 or 0.28% of Russia’s 5.6 million SMEs manage to export any of their goods while the domestic and export online markets are currently worth around $11bn and $3bn respectively.
Putin orders launch of ‘Russian Alibaba’ e-commerce aggregator site
Source: Kommersant