According to the results of 2017, the volume of the Russian online retail market overcame the mark of 1 trillion rubles, the Association of Internet Trading Companies estimated. Over the past year, the market grew only by 13%: it is less than in 2016, when this figure was 21%. The slowdown in growth may be due to a slowdown in the cross-border trade segment and a general decline in the purchasing power of the population, market participants believe. But this year they expect a new acceleration in the growth of Internet retail in Russia.

Last year, the Internet market in Russia increased by 13% to 1.04 trillion rubles, the president of the Association of Internet Trade Companies (ACIT) Alexei Fedorov said. "We have not reached the level that was expected, 22-23%, even close. The market has stopped growing at the speed with which it grew before that, "he said, adding that he does not have an exact explanation why this happened. For comparison: the growth of the online retail market in 2014 was 31%, in 2016 - 21%. The crisis year of 2015 was an exception, then the market grew only by 7%.

Decrease in the rate could be caused by a slowdown in the growth of cross-border trade, as well as a general decline in the purchasing power of citizens, the ACIT suggests. So, in the market of cross-border purchases in online stores, the growth rates decreased to about 24% per year in monetary terms, to 374.3 billion rubles, although in 2016 the growth was 37%. Decrease in the growth of shipments with goods from foreign online stores - 25% instead of 73% a year earlier.

At the same time, Russians are increasingly choosing in favor of foreign online retailers: the share of the foreign segment in the total volume of the e-commerce market has grown from 33% to 36%. By the way, in this segment, in the opinion of AKIT, in 2017, the output of new, "dynamically developing sites" - such as Pandao, Joom, Wish - largely influenced this segment. The vast majority of purchases (61.4%) in foreign online stores do not exceed € 22, AKIT calculated. The value of commodity investments 22.2% of all cross-border parcels were in the range of € 22-50, 11.6% - € 50-150, 3.1% - € 150-500, 1.2% - € 0.5-1 thousand, over € 1 thousand were worth only 0.5%. These data were obtained by ACIT as a result of an analysis of information on 112 million parcels from foreign online stores.

However, the first quarter of 2018 inspires optimism: according to preliminary data, the market growth exceeds the average indicator of 2017, points out Alexei Fedorov. According to AKIT's forecast, by the end of 2018 the Russian e-commerce market will increase to 1.25 trillion rubles, and its cross-border segment will reach 470 billion rubles. for the current year. Thus, the growth of the Internet market in Russia is expected to accelerate by about 20%.

Online trading accounts for about 3% of the total trade in Russia, which is 35 trillion rubles. pays attention to Mr. Fedorov. "It's not even close to what is happening, for example, in the UK: there, 18% of the trade in general is e-commerce." Russians shop in online stores primarily from personal computers. Therefore, the desktop traffic of Russian users, leading to the resources of online stores, is ahead of the mobile (52.5% vs. 47.5%), but the share of the latter is growing every year, experts say. Worldwide, mobile traffic is confidently dominating the desktop (66.7% vs. 33.3%).

The main company that delivers parcels from online stores is the Post of Russia. In 2017, the share of "Russian Post" in the Russian e-commerce delivery market grew by 5 percentage points and amounted to 67%. In cities with a population of more than 1 million people, the enterprise's share was 35%, with a population of 500,000 to 1 million people - 48%, and in cities up to 500,000 to 82% of the market.