According to analysts, the factors of the crisis will bring an additional 1,6 trillion rubles to online sales. for five years. Using Avito as an example, we figured out why classifieds have become one of the best sales channels for small businesses
New channel for growth
After the introduction of restrictive measures, many small offline retailers were on the verge of closing, online remained virtually the only sales channel. The problem is that despite the seeming cheapness (you can create a basic landing page almost for free at all), e-commerce is a rather expensive business that requires investments in attracting an audience, building logistics, establishing adequate feedback with customers and ensuring the safety of the purchase for the consumer. To close this need, online trading platforms, which already had a huge audience, undertook. For example, Avito with about 50 million monthly visitors and over 100 million transactions in 2020. The company has even created an entire ecosystem covering all the basic needs of merchants.
The main advantage for which small and medium-sized businesses go to classifieds is the cheap attraction of an audience. For example, the BigTV audio and video equipment store doubled its sales during the quarantine period compared to last year, primarily due to classifieds.
“Even before the pandemic, we began to actively sell electronics online. If we compare Avito with other acquisition channels, for example, contextual advertising and other marketplaces, then the cost of attracting customers here is twice as cheap. And it seems that we are not the only ones who have noticed this – now both the number of players and the assortment in all categories of goods are growing significantly on the site, ”said Alexei Martynov, founder of BigTV.
Sole proprietor Yulia Ustinova is engaged in sewing designer clothes. She mainly distributed it in small private boutiques, with Instagram serving as an additional channel. The girl turned to sales at Avito in mid-2019.
“When the pandemic story began, offline sales dropped to zero almost immediately. The Instagram audience, on the other hand, changes slowly, and most people cannot shop more often than, say, once every few months. And now it is almost impossible to pay for attracting a new audience: the prices for this service have grown to cosmic proportions. Therefore, sales on Avito helped me not to sink and even start to increase sales a little. Now about 60% of my products go through this site,” she says.
Turnkey e-commerce
Entrepreneurs face a large number of diverse tasks: where to sell goods, where to find a warehouse, where to place a room for an offline store, where to recruit employees, where to buy equipment, and so on. All these tasks can be solved on Avito: quickly create an account and start trading, choose the best points of sale, find workers, find warehouse and office space at the best price. Thus, Avito becomes onestopshop for business.
The RazBal auto parts store began selling through Avito with about 1 ads. The founder of the company, Dmitry Bachurin, says that he was attracted primarily by the quick registration and the ability to automatically upload commodity items from the company’s database to the site’s database. Now the number of ads has grown seven times. I even had to find a new warehouse for online sales, now the area for storing goods has tripled – up to 1,2 thousand square meters. m. The total turnover of the company is now 2,5 million rubles. per month, and about 70% of this amount is sales on Avito.
Shipping rate
As a rule, small companies are cautious about the Internet as a sales channel: they do not have the opportunity to build their own logistics, and the services of third-party players seem unreasonably expensive to them. For such companies, Avito launched several products at once for the delivery of goods both within the city and between different cities using the services of Dostavista, Boxberry, Yandex.Taxi, DPD and Mail to Our Country. The site offers several delivery options for private sellers and buyers at once: intercity and intracity delivery by courier. If earlier delivery was possible only to the points of issue of courier services, now, when delivering within major cities, users will be able to order a courier who will pick up the order from the seller and bring it to the buyer’s home. Delivery of goods can also be ordered from another city to the nearest point of issue of Boxberry partners. All delivery options are especially convenient given that secure contactless payment is available on the platform.
Now the delivery service to Avito is available for representatives of small and medium-sized businesses. The platform ensures safe receipt of money – the buyer draws up the goods on the site, and funds are frozen on his card. After he receives the goods and confirms the purchase, the money will be debited from his card and transferred to the seller’s account. Avito guarantees the return of the cost of the goods if the parcel is accidentally lost or damaged on the way.
The St. Petersburg store of outerwear and hats “Kepki24” began selling its products via the Internet during the 2008 crisis. Prior to this, the company had no sales online.
“Every year, the audience that bought our products via the Internet gradually increased. During the quarantine period, the number of such sales reached 90%. In the vast majority of cases, the clothing trade implies the possibility of trying on, often the buyer simply cannot understand whether this or that accessory suits him until he tries it on personally, so the Avito service turned out to be very convenient for us, allowing the buyer to return the purchase that did not fit him free of charge . Despite this, when the authorities allowed the stores to reopen, we saw a large influx of people, which suggests that it will not be possible to completely abandon offline in the foreseeable future, the possibility of physical contact with products is still important for our customers, ”said the founder Caps24 Alexander Nemtyrev.
The results of 2020 in Russian e-commerce directly depend on whether the authorities will go for the introduction of new restrictive measures, but the general trend is that distance selling is becoming more accessible. The development of infrastructure is due to the fact that many large companies, under pressure of circumstances, take on roles that were previously unusual for them, grocery retailers open points for issuing orders, taxi operators deliver food and purchases from online stores. All this has made e-commerce accessible to almost all segments of the population.
Data Insight analysts have built a forecast for the development of online commerce for the next five years, taking into account the impact of the crisis on the growth of online sales, including positive (for growth) and negative factors. The compound annual growth (CAGR) of e-commerce from 2019 to 2024 will be 33,2%. During this time, the market for sales of material goods via the Internet will grow from 1,7 to 7,2 trillion rubles. The natural growth of e-commerce, excluding the impact of the corona crisis (but taking into account investments in e-commerce of the largest players) would have amounted to 26,6% (CAGR) over the same period, that is, the e-commerce market in 2024 would have amounted to 5,6 trillion rub. Thus, the factors of the crisis will additionally bring 1,6 trillion rubles into online sales. for five years. According to the company, three months of quarantine led to online shopping at least 10 million people.
After the lifting of the self-isolation regime, many consumers still prefer online shopping to shopping malls. Data Insight analysts suggest that this trend will continue in 2021, after which it will come to naught. At the same time, millions of people in our country have switched to remote work. Some of them will leave megacities, which will give additional growth to online commerce, as the usual assortment will no longer be within walking distance. The Association of e-commerce companies (AKIT) also calls the pandemic an important factor in the growth of the market. According to the results of January-June 2020, the share of e-commerce in the total retail turnover has already reached 10,9%, the head of AKIT Artem Sokolov told TASS. This brings Russia closer to the leading countries — the USA (share of e-commerce — 13,9%) and China (share — 29,9%).
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