According to the Morgan Stanley report, there are numerous e-commerce initiatives in Russia that have received fundings over the past years which will, aside from the willingness of consumers to shop online, boost the e-commerce market. It helps Russian retailers to focus on key pain points, like delivery times, to create a better customer proposition.

A lack of international players
The Morgan Stanley report refers to the lack of international players in the market. This is partially true, as large companies like Amazon never developed local operations in Russia and they are less successful in selling goods from abroad. Despite that, there are several German and Chinese players that play an important role in the Russian market.

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To reach this goal, Ant Financial has raised 11.87 billion euros. With these new funds, Alipay will develop further in Europe. Wang told the Dutch newspaper: "We have a huge advantage over the competition. We have invested millions to discover what works and what doesn’t." With this information, it wants to invest in European countries where it is already successful, like Russia, and where it is based less, like France.

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Products ordered from Tmall will be delivered from warehouses of Alibaba’s partners in Russia. Director of Development of AliExpress in Russia, Mark Zavadsky, says that localizing AliExpress in Russia started two years ago with the launch of marketplace “Mall” within the platform. The upgrade to Tmall will provide better quality of services to a more careful selection of goods, a single warehouse and logistics based on courier delivery.

Russia is a logical choice as a first market aside from China, because it has a large population and is reasonably underdeveloped when it comes to e-commerce. Besides that, it has close cultural and geographical ties to China.

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Most online stores, 175.000, are available in Germany, followed by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France and Russia. The stores in Germany account for 20 percent of all stores in Europe. Most surprising might be the third place for the Netherlands. In the small country, there are over 82.000 shops. As the Netherlands is fairly small, this makes it clear that large marketplaces like Amazon and eBay are not as common, while internet penetration is high and (smaller online stores have been developing more over the years.

In total, the top 5 countries account more than two-thirds of all online stores in Europe.

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Cross-border trade in Russia grew even harder than the total e-commerce industry, as it increased by 34 percent during the first six months of 2017. It is expected that cross-border e-commerce will account for 37% of e-commerce in Russia by the end of this year. This means it will be worth over 6 billion euros by the end of the year.

The Russian market has a huge imbalance between imports and exports. Alexey Fedorov, president of AITC, states that local sellers of appliances and electronics saw their revenues grow 11 percent, now worth 1.4 billion euros. It will squeeze out Russia’s online sales of small appliances and apparel within a couple of years if cross-border e-commerce keeps these growth rates.”

Russian cross-border online shoppers like to shop in China, which holds a 90 percent share of foreign goods ordered by Russian customers.

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