Russian website online payments surge, Yandex payments ‘favored’

Today’s international giants, from Microsoft, SONY PlayStation and Nintendo to Alibaba and ASOS, have entered the Russian e-commerce market. Even so, there is still plenty of room for smaller foreign merchants, as the market is far from saturated.






The Russian e-commerce market is growing, with statistics showing an unprecedented growth rate of 59% in 2018. According to the latest data from the Russian Association of E-Commerce Enterprises (AKIT), the market size of Russian e-commerce reached 1.66 trillion rubles ($25.5 billion) in 2018, with a market growth rate of about 20% in the last three years.

Russian consumers spent $9.7 billion (610 billion rubles) on online stores abroad, according to the central bank. In 2018, the income of foreign businesses in the Russian market increased significantly, reaching 34.7%.

In a recent Morgan Stanley study, banking experts predicted that Russian e-commerce would triple in five years, reaching $31 billion in the physical commodity e-commerce market by 2020 and up to $52 billion by 2023.

On July 23, MARC international research center studied how online shops and e-commerce platforms in Russia collect money online.



According to the study, the number of websites that can be used to make online payments increased by 15 percent in 2018, to a total of 143,000. The above 85% of the website customers can pay by bank card, 3% of the website through the payment gateway to collect, 20% directly with online banking collection, 67% with the existing payment solution. The largest payment solutions were Yandex Pay (37.6%) and Robokassa (8.7%).

The way to open online trade payment in Russia is usually to find the payment service provider through the website, and the service provider helps to open the online payment. Although the growth rate of such websites is not high relative to the total number of online payment platforms (from 66% in 2017 to 67% at the end of 2018), the absolute growth target has reached 14,000 websites. The top five payment providers have not changed since 2017, but only their market share has changed: Yandex payment (37.6%) ranks first, Robokassa(8.7%) ranks second, Payeer(4.4%) ranks third, UnitPay(3.9%) ranks fourth, and PayAnyWay(3.3%) ranks fifth.

Editor’s note: Yandex Payments is Russia’s largest electronic payment service provider, providing a common payment solution for online stores that supports online payments through bank cards, e-wallets, mobile banking and online banking. At the same time to support the Russian mobile phone bill balance payment and in Russia more than 170,000 cash receiving points for cash payments. Yandex payment has more than 7. Fifty thousand online Internet stores use the company’s payment system.