Biggest Russian e-tailer starts European conquest

Wildberries, the largest e-commerce player in Russia, now wants to conquer the European Union with the launch of an English website and the opening of its first pick-up point in the EU, in Warsaw.

Poland first

The Russian company announced that, in the long term, it wants to open about a hundred pick-up points in the Central European country. In a press release, Development Director Vyacheslav Ivashchenko says that Poland was not accidentally chosen” as the first EU country to settle in. Wildberries points to Poland’s strategic location and its growing e-commerce market. .

The e-tailer specialises in fashion and gives its customers the option between having their clothes delivered to their home or picking up their order themselves at one of the pick-up points, which are equipped with fitting rooms. The company is active in five former Soviet states (Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) and now also in Poland.

E-commerce boom

Wildberries was founded in 2004 by Vladislav and Tatiana Bakalchuk, and has grown in these fifteen years to become a company with an average of 750,000 orders per day and a turnover exceeding the 3.1 billion euro mark last year, a 94 % increase compared to 2018.

The Russian e-commerce sector is booming: in the first half of last year, the combined sales of the three largest e-tailers in the country (Wildberries, Apteka and Ozon) increased by 107 %.