What I recommend for Yandex Market to become a good marketplace in 2024

Everyone here has a personal rating of marketplaces where they want to order more often. For example, I basically don’t have something there that everyone knows here – “purple”. The decision not to order anything there was made at the family level and I don’t regret it at all. But today is not about him.

In 2023 I made almost a hundred orders from Yandex Market, from small items to large items and gadgets. In two years, it went from being a niche to one of the five largest marketplaces in the country. With all the advantages that the service brought to me personally, I want to highlight several important disadvantages.

I hope that the decision for the majority of leaders and service managers is laid down at the chimes of the New Year. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Write transparently and ensure storage of goods.

If this is considered “sufficient” information about conservation over the past two years, then I have bad news

Yandex is convenient to organize this plan. Information about warranty service for purchased goods (especially important for gadgets and household appliances) is located anywhere. Can be in the characteristics, in the main card, near the price tag and button Buy, and sometimes – completely absent. You need to search in 5 different places.

Moreover, the support service for questions of this nature walks around carefully, promising to solve any problems that arise if contacted. What is the story with the durable, cheap iPhone 15 in Russia? Personally, such ping-pong does not inspire confidence in me. Quite the contrary.

In the end, this is the main reason why I avoid taking anything more than 200 “conventional units” in this service. I hope that in 2024 the Yandex marketplace will make information about guarantees a mandatory part of the main card and bring it to the most prominent place, especially for technically complex goods. The more you know where to go in the event of a breakdown or defect 15 days from the date of purchase, the calmer you will be in throwing the item into the cart.

2. Introduce clear consequences for sellers leaving the marketplace.

Something unexpected happened, but what happens next? “When it breaks, I’ll find out”

A little less than two months ago, I made my first more or less large purchase on the Market: I bought a 3D printer for almost 120 thousand rubles.

Literally a few days after delivery by the seller from the platform. Regarding my questions about who I will now ultimately have to contact regarding warranty issues and other service issues, the Market support service answered evasively: they say, if there are problems, write, and we will sort it out there.

Why did the seller disappear from the platform? Support does not disclose this information. They banned him, he left himself, he simply disappeared into nowhere – no one will tell you. Sit back and hope that you will have to comply if problems arise. It’s good that information about the seller is saved in the order history. But you know, his legal address with the name of an individual entrepreneur will not work well, except in the case of preparing documents for the court.

By the way, this issue can be resolved by translating it into the first vital point: clear and understandable conditions, guarantees for any period of the product, including it, conditions and point of payment for the buyer with any requests.

3. Improve logistics and order processing.

You can not leave your wife for 4 hours, rewriting the same phrases. Just decide something…

One of the strongest aspects of Yandex Market for me personally was its efficient logistics. More precisely, it seemed so to me. When other marketplaces regularly did not deliver, lost and canceled orders out of the blue, Yandex worked clearly: there is a date, it will be delivered to the pickup point, period. Everything has changed since December.

More than 50% of orders placed began to arrive a day or two later. Some were canceled on the day of delivery. And one got lost. For example, a week ago I ordered three protective glasses for my son’s iPad Air. It was necessary to replace it, otherwise the old one would crack and fulfill its function. They brought promises within a day. As you can already see from the screenshot above, it happened differently.

And it seems that everything can be understood here: holidays, the volume of orders is huge, everything is overloaded. But couldn’t the company have predicted that this would be the case for the New Year?

On the third day, I received letters several times a day at my email address associated with Yandex Market, the content of which is always the same: “we haven’t done anything yet, but we are doing our best to save it.” I’m ready to wait a couple more days, generally microscopically, but I need an order.

A marketplace that withholds or anticipates orders loses trust even faster than one that behaves more rudely towards the consumer, but fulfills them honestly. I hope that Yandex Market will sort out the logistics and keep in force the reason why I began to use it more sparingly. And by the next New Year, ordering there will not turn into a lottery.

4. Send private messages to sellers available for purchase.

Good luck finding out the answer to an unexpected question. buy first!

In Yandex Market, communication works like this. If you want to ask a question do purchase, then this can only be done this way: write publicly in the “Questions” section in the card specifically for the product. There are no “personal notes” provided – unlike, for example, AliExpress.

This kind of result happens regularly. The product is lying around, including the expensive “Questions” section, either completely empty, or (even more often) other working buyers are filling out questions with no or no answers. Or, even worse, with the answers of other Market users. And they, by the way, can easily make a mistake or write complete nonsense, misleading both the questioner and those reading this thread.

Yandex has its own Messenger, built-in including in the Market. Why can’t I establish contact with the seller through him? Personally, this is absolutely incomprehensible to me. Logical reason No I don’t see introducing this function.

The impossibility of clarifying information about products from sellers BEFORE, and not after, the purchase, the desire to purchase cooling on Yandex Market, especially when it comes to gadgets and equipment.

5. Put things in order in product cards, and especially in names.

If you enter the name into the search, you may get not just one product, but a dozen results from different stores. For example, there are headphones that I praised in the fall – Haylou S35. We drive them in and get six external correct results – but all in some sense. Same headphones, but slightly different spellings everywhere. For some, the color is included in the name, for others the characteristics are added… Porridge, crosses.

Inside the card is a Yandex Market product. Allows you to select offers by price and delivery conditions. But if other sellers name the product differently, the marketplace will consider the products different – and their offer simply will not appear in other cards of the same product.

If you go, for example, to the first card of the example above, only a part of the sellers will be displayed in it. Some flowers will not be there.

The ability of sellers to freely write down the name of the product floods marketplaces only to a small extent with different offers of the same products, which introduces fuss and opacity of choice, which is inconvenient for the buyer. There should be a system that forces the seller to either adhere to one name format or hard-code one SKU for all similar products.

One card with all the options, changes and bets is better than 10 different ones, which means you have to go back and forth to find the right conditions.

PS Among the giants of the marketplace market in Russia, Yandex Market is the youngest. There is both the right and the opportunity to correct the above-mentioned points. But there is always the possibility of things getting worse. I hope that the second option in the company will not work. Competitors are not asleep…