Research shows that having a Russian version of your website is a wise business investment!

We have already written about the importance of speaking the language of your customers and about the role of localization in this process.

As we mentioned before, we live and work in Russia; therefore, as soon as we came across new data about the Russian retail and e-commerce markets we couldn’t help sharing them with you. These data are especially important for those thinking to expand their business, specifically about conquering the Russian-speaking market.

Enter Vision Strategic Research Center and Google conducted the research of the retail and e-commerce market in 2013 and the first quarter of 2014. So what conclusions did they make?

Retail data first:
1. In 2013 the retail market growth in Russia slowed down to only 9.7% compared with 14.3% in 2012.
2. In spite of this slight decrease, the non-food retail sector comprises 53% of the whole retail market.
3. In 2013 the most popular category of non-food items was sports products. It had the highest growth rate (18.8%). Car spare parts category holds the second place (14.8% growth rate) and cosmetics ended up on the third place (13.5% growth rate).
4. Four product categories showed the worst progress: watches (no growth at all, looks like there’s a sales crisis here), clothes and footwear (3% growth rate), household products (3.5% growth rate), and jewelry (3.7% growth).

Well, it is clear that the retail sector is experiencing a tough time, though it is certainly not the worst situation. How is the e-commerce sector doing?

At present, the e-commerce market is growing faster than the economy of the country! The number of Internet users in the first quarter of 2014 grew up 10% compared to the first quarter of 2013 and reached 68.7 mln people. The number of online shoppers is also growing very fast: 24% during the past 2 years. According to the data provided by Google we can see that the most popular product categories in 2013 were pet products (the number of search queries grew by 36%), jewelry (31% growth), juvenile products (30% growth), sports and leisure products (28%), as well as clothes, footwear and accessories (27%).

The overall investment amount into the Russian e-commerce market in 2013 reached 12.79 billion rubles. “Morgan Stanley forecasts the Russian ecommerce sector to grow 35% annually to 2015, reaching 4.5% of total retail sales. According to East-West Digital News, the Russian ecommerce sector could grow to 35 billion to 50 billion euros by the end of this decade and exceed 75 billion euros in ten years.” (source)

So what do all these numbers tell us? They tell us that the number of Russian Internet users is growing so actively that it is becoming increasingly impractical not to have a Russian version of your website. Foreign companies that have not localized their websites into Russian are losing a huge business growth opportunity. However, those companies that already have a Russian version of their websites can be sure that they made a wise business decision, and this investment will pay off in full.

The original report in Russian can be accessed here.

Would you like to know more about localization? Contact us! We will be happy to answer all your questions.