Online traded in conflicts – Newspaper Kommersant No. 45 (7490) of 03/17/2023

“We have giant technology companies that think they rule the world,” said US Senator and then US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren back in 2019. So she presented a plan to separate large companies, in particular the Internet giant Amazon, about the growing dependence of society on which American economists have been talking since 2017.

The issue of the influence of such companies in Russia was clearly manifested this week in a series of scandals around the country’s largest online platform Wildberries with a turnover of 1.67 trillion rubles. for 2022. On Tuesday, representatives of Wildberries’ pickup points (POIs) laid siege to the company’s office, outraged by the “enslaving conditions” of work, including fines for substitution of goods by customers, threatening to close the PIZ.

At Wildberries, they first said that the Telegram channels that reported the “strike” “blew a molehill out of a fly.” But then there was news about the prosecutor’s inspection of violations of the labor rights of Wildberries workers, as well as the readiness of State Duma deputies to amend the legislation to prevent such situations. As a result, on Thursday, Wildberries announced that it will freeze the mechanism for write-offs for substitutions and will “update” the feedback system with employees and partners in the near future.

This is not the first time Wildberries has been in the news due to complaints from counterparties and partners. First of all, in the market, this is associated with the huge size of the company’s business, its active growth and, as a result, the huge number of people who want to work with Wildberries and the capabilities of the site due to its scale.

As my interlocutors say, the origins of this week’s high-profile news may be to be found in Wildberries’ complicated relationship with sellers, which led to the creation of “Standards for the interaction of online platforms with sellers” at the end of 2022. The document consolidated the basic rights and obligations of the parties, and the sellers gained confidence. So, my sources say, sellers began to claim damages for goods damaged or replaced at the pickup point, which happened more and more often due to the growth in business turnover. The sites, in turn, began to introduce substitution penalties for the pickup points themselves. According to my interlocutors, such sanctions appeared in the fall of 2022, but their size for the pickup point operators became tangible only recently, which caused the “explosion”.

For supporters of tighter regulation of e-commerce, the Wildberries story will be a great opportunity to raise this issue again, earning political points. And online platforms, it seems to me, have received another incentive for real self-regulation, which is so much talked about. Otherwise, it will be extremely difficult to avoid unpopular decisions that can complicate the work of online trading for all parties.