Yandex Market was launched in November 2000, and is an online market place for goods and services accessible through the internet. It is Russia’s most popular e-commerce website, with more than 250 million monthly visits according to Similar Web.
The site typically has around 50 thousand new items added each day and as of April 2016 there were more than 500 thousand vendors listed on the platform.
Yandex’s online marketplace allows vendors to advertise various products by category or type. It also allows vendors to advertise their own websites from their Yandex vendor pages, this is similar to eBay sellers being allowed to list their own websites on eBay.
A fee for seller services is charged, in the case of Yandex Market the fee is 5%. Yandex does not charge a listing fee for products.
Vendors are able to create an online storefront where customers can browse and buy and sellers can manage their online store via a web-based control panel. Products are offered by categories such as Books, Music, Video Games etc. Vendors and products are ranked by popularity based on average customer rating and number of sales; buyers can view popular vendors or products near them using Google Maps integration.
Yandex Market also offers a service which sends push notifications about related news and items to the user.
The marketplace has many features to make it easy for users to find what they are looking for. The search function makes use of natural language understanding algorithms, allowing users to find desired items using simple keywords or even phrases of words to describe exactly what they are trying to find. Search results then appear in the form of an image, along with a title and description of the product, customer ratings, pricing information, seller rating and seller location.
The website also allows users to search items by the seller, allowing users to select a preferred seller.
When users find an item they wish to purchase, they can add it to their Yandex Market catalog. Items added here are held in a virtual basket for future purchase, or can be accessed later from the user’s profile page.
Yandex Marketplace also offers a service called “Recommendation Engine” which uses machine learning algorithms to predict what product categories each user might be interested in.
Yandex Marketplace does not make any direct sales, they instead take a commission when the vendor sells their item(s), typically between 5-15%, but this figure is negotiable with the vendor.
The Yandex Market desktop and mobile site is available in Russian, Ukrainian and English.
Yandex Market is a major competitor to other eCommerce websites in the region, including Russia’s largest e-commerce website, Ulmart, which has been in business since 2006.
The main differences between Yandex and Ulmart are the way they have set out their offerings – while Ulmart offers more of an “online shopping mall” where users can browse through a large selection of products from different vendors under different categories; Yandex focuses on offering more of an Amazon -style marketplace where users can find items from multiple vendors within one category (i.e. Books).
