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MOSCOW, May 31.Wildberries founder Tatyana Bakalchuk asked the authorities to postpone state regulation of the e-commerce industry and said that in the near future the company plans to change its external communications strategy and become more open.
“We understand very well that there are more and more theses about the regulation of the industry. But we ask you to really postpone this story, because I will say such a common phrase: where state regulation appears, growth stops there. This is actually so,» she said, speaking at the Russian Retail Week 2023 forum.
She stressed that now, in her opinion, a new economy is being formed, «platform, as it seems to us.» “We are all trying to make sure that it is built correctly, transparently, with clear principles. We are for self-regulation and are ready to triple our efforts to make it all successful,” Bakalchuk stressed.
Speaking about her company, she added that she sees the main task of increasing the openness of Wildberries. «Our main task, we are constantly analyzing the whole situation, in that we see that we really need to be more open, build other communications, in a different way, build feedback from directly those people who are affected by our platform. In In the near future, we will probably present our plan to the media and government agencies,» Bakalchuk added.
Before that, Secretary of State — Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation Viktor Evtukhov, also speaking at the forum, said that the ministry does not exclude the possibility of introducing additional regulation for the e-commerce industry, including for marketplaces. Proposing, among other things, to think together on the development of regulation of online commerce.
In mid-May, Wildberries announced that its security service had uncovered illegal ways to promote on the site using external services — according to preliminary data, the damage amounted to about 650 million rubles. The accounts of 300 sellers were blocked, whom the company suspected of using gray schemes. Later, the marketplace reported that for 60% of them it was decided to unfreeze the balance and resume cooperation — the amount of damage they caused was not high. The inspection by law enforcement officers of the rest has been extended until June 10 — according to Wildberries, these 40% «caused significant damage to the company.»
On May 23, about 70 people gathered at the Wildberries headquarters in Moscow with a demand to unblock their accounts, the correspondent reported. According to the head of the initiative group Maxim Gromov, a total of 2.5 billion rubles were blocked on the accounts of more than 300 legal entities.