InsightsConsumersLast updated: 22 October 2024

Russia's E-Commerce in 2024: 10.7 Trillion Rubles, 7.4 Billion Orders and the Economics of a Slowing, Concentrated Market

By the end of 2024, the volume of the e-commerce market in Russia will grow by 36% to 10.7 trillion rubles, and the number of online orders placed during the year will grow by 43% to 7.4 billion. That is the forecast of the research company Data Insight (Дата Инсайт), presented by Elizaveta Khobotina (Елизавета Хоботина) at the "Retail Day: e-commerce, logistics and warehouses" conference of the Kommersant publishing house; Kommersant reported the forecast on October 22, 2024. Two numbers, taken alone, look like another record year for Russian online retail. Taken together with the rest of the Data Insight picture, they describe something more interesting: a market that is still growing fast but no longer accelerating, and that is concentrating faster than it grows.

The second feature of the 2024 forecast is precisely that concentration. Between July 2023 and June 2024, five billion orders — 81% of the entire Russian online market — passed through just four marketplaces: Wildberries, Ozon, Yandex Market and Megamarket. In 2021 the same four platforms held 58% of orders. A market that slows from +48% to +36% in turnover while its top four gain more than twenty percentage points of order share is a market whose internal economics are being rewritten — for the four platforms themselves, for the category online stores that still hold the electronics pool, and for the 19% of orders that live outside the big four. This analysis asks what the combination of slowing growth and rising concentration changes for each of them.

The 2024 forecast: 10.7 trillion rubles and 7.4 billion orders

The headline of the Data Insight forecast is a pair of growth rates applied to a already large base. Turnover of 10.7 trillion rubles means an absolute increment of about 2.8 trillion rubles over the 7.9 trillion rubles of 2023 — more than the entire e-commerce turnover of Russia in 2020, which stood at 2.6 trillion rubles. The order side is even starker in absolute terms: 7.4 billion orders against 5.2 billion in 2023 is an addition of 2.2 billion orders in a single year, exceeding the total order volume of 2021, when the whole market processed 1.7 billion orders. A market that adds in one year more than it once processed in a full year is not a market in decline; the word "slowdown" describes the derivative, not the level.

• Turnover of the Russian e-commerce market in 2024 (forecast): 10.7 trillion rubles, +36% year on year;
• Number of orders in 2024 (forecast): 7.4 billion, +43% year on year;
• Base of 2023: 7.9 trillion rubles (+48%) and 5.2 billion orders (+80%);
• Concentration: 81% of orders in July 2023–June 2024 at four marketplaces, against 58% in 2021;
• Outside the big four: e-grocery 10% of orders, e-pharma 4%, everything else 5%.

Khobotina's own summary of the forecast fits into a single sentence: the market is growing, but its growth is slowing. That formulation matters because it separates two questions that a single headline number conflates. The first question is how large the market becomes — and there the answer for 2024 is unambiguous: larger than ever, by a margin equal to a whole earlier epoch of its history. The second question is what the growth rate does to the behaviour of participants — and there the answer is less comfortable, because a decelerating market distributes opportunity differently from an accelerating one.

The deceleration also has a price dimension that follows arithmetically from the two growth rates. If turnover grows by 36% while orders grow by 43%, the implied average value of an order falls by roughly five percent year on year. The same arithmetic for 2023 (+48% turnover against +80% orders) implies an even steeper fall. Nothing in the Data Insight figures says why the implied cheque shrinks; but the direction is consistent across years, and it is the first clue that the growth of the Russian online market is increasingly a growth of transaction counts rather than of transaction values.

The 2020–2023 curve: where the slowdown comes from

The 2024 forecast can only be read against the four-year curve that precedes it. Data Insight's historical series shows a market that doubled its growth logic twice: an explosive pandemic phase, a sanctions-year phase that surprisingly did not break the trajectory, and a 2023 re-acceleration that set the base for the current forecast.

1. 2020: turnover 2.6 trillion rubles (+65%), 0.8 billion orders (+78%);
2. 2021: turnover 3.9 trillion rubles (+49%), 1.7 billion orders (+105%);
3. 2022: turnover 5.3 trillion rubles (+36%), 2.9 billion orders (+63%);
4. 2023: turnover 7.9 trillion rubles (+48%), 5.2 billion orders (+80%).

Two observations follow from the series. First, +36% is not a new low: 2022 grew at exactly the same turnover rate, and 2024's forecast simply returns the market to that speed after the 2023 spike. The difference is the base. In 2022, +36% was added to 5.3 trillion rubles; in 2024, the same percentage is added to 7.9 trillion rubles, a base roughly half as large again. The identical growth rate therefore represents a materially larger absolute effort — more warehouses, more couriers, more fulfilment capacity absorbed per percentage point of growth.

Second, the order curve outruns the turnover curve in every single year of the series: +78% against +65% in 2020, +105% against +49% in 2021, +63% against +36% in 2022, +80% against +48% in 2023, and +43% against +36% in the 2024 forecast. A persistent gap of that shape means the unit of growth in Russian e-commerce is the order, not the ruble. The market is training its customers to buy online more often and in smaller baskets, and the 2024 forecast extends that training rather than reversing it.

Why the deceleration is structural rather than accidental

A deceleration can be cyclical — a bad season, a one-off macro shock — or structural, the natural behaviour of a penetration curve as it matures. The Data Insight series points to the second reading. The pandemic years pulled forward demand that would otherwise have arrived later; 2021's +105% order growth was, among other things, the consumption of that reserve. Once the reserve is spent, growth returns to the pace at which new habits form, and that pace is what the +36% and +43% of 2024 describe. On this reading, 2023 was the exception — a year in which price effects and category expansion temporarily re-inflated the rate — and 2024 is the rule reasserting itself on a much larger base.

The structural reading has a direct consequence for competition. In an accelerating market, a small player can grow simply by existing inside a rising tide. In a decelerating market, growth has to be taken from someone else. That is the environment in which the concentration numbers of July 2023–June 2024 were produced, and it is the reason the two halves of the Data Insight picture — slowing growth and rising concentration — belong together.

Concentration: 81% of orders with four marketplaces

The concentration figure is the most consequential number in the forecast. Over the twelve months from July 2023 to June 2024, five billion orders — 81% of the Russian online market — were placed on four platforms: Wildberries, Ozon, Yandex Market and Megamarket. In 2021 the combined share of the same four was 58%. Twenty-three percentage points of order share moved to the top four in roughly three years, and the move continued through the slowdown: the window in which the share reached 81% includes the decelerating months of late 2023 and the first half of 2024.

The complement of the 81% is a map of the rest of the market. E-grocery accounts for 10% of orders, e-pharma for 4%, and everything else — the category online stores, brand stores and smaller platforms combined — for the remaining 5%. Read carefully, that distribution says that the resistance to marketplace concentration is not coming from generalist retail at all: it is coming from two verticals, food and pharma, whose logistics, regulation and purchase frequency differ from the marketplace model. The generic "other" segment, which includes the electronics category stores discussed below, holds only five percent of orders even though its turnover pool is close to a trillion rubles — a reminder that order share and turnover share are two different currencies in this market.

Why concentration kept rising while growth slowed

The intuitive expectation is the opposite of what the data show: a slowing market should loosen concentration, because slower growth weakens the leaders' ability to subsidise expansion. The Russian curve went the other way, and the mechanism is visible in the structure of the forecast itself. When the market grows at +80% in orders, new buyers arrive who have no established platform loyalty, and smaller players meet them first in their niches. When growth falls to +43%, most new orders come from existing online buyers ordering more often — and repeat orders flow to the platform where the buyer already has an account, a saved address and a habit. Deceleration converts growth from acquisition to repetition, and repetition favours scale.

There is a seller-side mirror of the same logic. In a decelerating market, a seller's own growth depends on being where the traffic already is. With 81% of orders on four platforms, the traffic is there; the alternative channels shrink in relative terms even when they grow in absolute ones. Concentration, on this reading, is not an accident that happened alongside the slowdown — it is partly a product of it.

The category map: where marketplaces win and where category stores hold

Data Insight's category breakdown adds a third layer to the picture, and it is the layer that explains who exactly loses and who holds. Clothing and footwear, with turnover of 875 billion rubles, and goods for home and repair (DIY/HD), with about 1.1 trillion rubles, are sold mainly through the four marketplaces. Electronics, with about 1 trillion rubles of turnover, remains mainly with category online stores. Three pools of comparable size — 875 billion rubles, about 1.1 trillion rubles and about 1 trillion rubles — follow two opposite distribution logics inside a single national market.

The split is not random. Clothing, footwear and home goods are categories of wide assortment and high comparison intensity: the buyer's task is to choose among thousands of comparable offers, which is exactly the task a marketplace interface solves. Electronics at the scale of about 1 trillion rubles is a different purchase: configuration, compatibility, warranty service and trust in the seller weigh more than breadth of listing, and category online stores have so far defended that ground. The 2024 forecast does not say the defence will hold; it says that as of the reporting date it does.

Three categories, three economies

The three pools also differ in what they mean for the concentration story. The marketplace-held pools — clothing and footwear at 875 billion rubles and home and repair at about 1.1 trillion rubles — are the turnover expression of the 81% order share: high-frequency, comparison-driven purchases that generate both the orders and the habit. The category-store pool in electronics, at about 1 trillion rubles, is the largest single turnover block outside the big four, and therefore the natural target for any marketplace seeking the next increment of share in a decelerating market. If the 81% is to become 85% or 90%, the additional points will most plausibly come from a pool of this size rather than from the five percent "other" residue.

The e-grocery and e-pharma pockets sit on the other side of the same map. Together they hold 14 of the 19 percentage points of order share outside the big four — 10% and 4% respectively. Their resistance is structural: daily and medically motivated purchases demand delivery models, storage conditions and licensing that the generalist marketplace model does not provide by default. In a slowing market, these two verticals are the least concentrated growth pockets left, and their shares are among the few numbers in the forecast that could move visibly in either direction by 2025.

How the slowdown rewrites the economics of the big four

For Wildberries, Ozon, Yandex Market and Megamarket, the 2024 forecast changes the source of bargaining power. In the acceleration years, a platform's power came from growth itself: sellers joined because the platform was growing, and the platform grew because sellers joined. With growth decelerating to +36% in turnover and +43% in orders, and with 81% of orders already inside the four, power shifts from the promise of growth to the control of an existing flow. The platforms become less like expanding frontiers and more like established retail real estate: the traffic is a stock they administer, not a tide that carries everyone.

• Traffic as a stock: with 81% of orders, the four platforms hold the default destination of the Russian online buyer; in a decelerating market that stock, not new-buyer acquisition, becomes the core asset;
• Seller dependence: a seller facing +36% market growth has little room to grow outside the platforms that hold four fifths of orders, which strengthens the platforms' hand on commissions and advertising prices;
• Fulfilment density: the absolute increment of 2.2 billion orders a year still has to be stored, sorted and delivered, so logistics capacity remains the binding constraint even at a slower growth rate;
• The electronics frontier: the about 1 trillion ruble category-store pool is the largest turnover block outside the four, and the most plausible source of the next points of concentration;
• The vertical pockets: e-grocery at 10% and e-pharma at 4% of orders are the least concentrated segments, and therefore the places where platform expansion would change the market structure most visibly.

What the same slowdown means for category players

The category online stores that hold electronics, and the vertical players that hold food and pharma, face the mirror image of the same deceleration. Their defence cannot rest on market growth, because in a decelerating market growth no longer lifts all boats; it has to rest on depth of category — assortment, expertise, service — that the marketplace interface does not replicate. The 2024 numbers say this defence currently works in electronics, where about 1 trillion rubles stays outside the four, and in the two verticals that together hold 14 percentage points of order share. What the numbers do not say is how durable that position is once the platforms, themselves squeezed by deceleration, turn to the largest remaining pools for their next increment of share.

There is also a pricing consequence for the category players. A market in which the implied average order value falls year after year — roughly five percent in 2024 by the arithmetic of the two growth rates — is a market where turnover growth flatters less than it looks. For a category store competing on service rather than price, a shrinking implied cheque compresses the margin available to finance that service. The slowdown, in other words, pressures the category players' economics from the same direction as the concentration: both make scale relatively cheaper and depth relatively more expensive.

What to watch into 2025

The 2024 forecast is a snapshot of a transition, and the Data Insight series gives a compact list of indicators by which the transition can be tracked over the following year.

• The gap between order growth and turnover growth: +43% against +36% in 2024 continues a five-year pattern in which orders outrun rubles, and its width measures how fast the implied average cheque shrinks;
• The big-four order share: 81% in July 2023–June 2024 against 58% in 2021 — any further advance shows concentration surviving the slowdown;
• The e-grocery and e-pharma shares, 10% and 4% of orders: the least concentrated pockets, and the first place where a change in the verticals' resistance would appear;
• The electronics pool of about 1 trillion rubles: the largest turnover block outside the four marketplaces, and the likeliest battlefield for the next points of concentration;
• The 2024 rates against the 2023 actuals: +36% and +43% against +48% and +80% define how deep the normalisation is, and whether 2023 was a spike or a level.

Conclusion: a slower market with a harder centre

The Data Insight forecast of October 22, 2024 describes a Russian e-commerce market that is simultaneously maturing and hardening. Maturing, because its growth rates — +36% in turnover to 10.7 trillion rubles, +43% in orders to 7.4 billion — are returning from the exceptional levels of 2021 and 2023 toward the pace of a large, penetrated market. Hardening, because the centre of gravity keeps moving toward four platforms that already carry 81% of orders, up from 58% in 2021, while the resistance outside them narrows to two verticals and one large category pool. Khobotina's formula — the market is growing, but its growth is slowing — is therefore only half of the story; the other half is that the slower the growth becomes, the more of it accrues to the centre. For sellers, buyers and regulators, the practical question of 2025 is not whether the Russian online market will keep growing — the forecast leaves little doubt that it will — but on whose infrastructure, and on whose terms, that growth will be booked.