Online fashion is big business. The sector has become one of the largest in ecommerce today, as both retailers and consumers have embraced the digital channel for selling/purchasing fashion items of all kinds.
This is no different in Russia, where Yandex reports that about 2.4 million searches are carried out each day about clothes, shoes or accessories. On Yandex alone!
The leading Russian search company is now tapping into this lucrative market by offering a service, which enables users to compare and purchase clothes and footwear online. The new service, dubbed Garderobe (Wardrobe would be the English equivalent), is part of the company’s broader and hugely popular price aggregation service, Yandex Market, whose monthly audience exceeds 13 million. Yandex.Market was launched in 2000 and has since evolved into a marketplace with more than 48 million price suggestions in 300 categories from around 11,000 e-retailers. This makes it the biggest of its kind in Russia and the CIS.
Get discovered through Yandex.Garderobe
In a press release, Yandex states that online shoppers can already pick from nearly a million products from hundreds of major retailers in Russia and Ukraine. Garderobe is not new competition to existing online fashion retailers, but rather a new platform for those retailers to get their products discovered. For example, when clicking “Buy” in the image below, I am directed to Boutique.ru – Russia’s largest online fashion retailer – to complete the purchase.
As it is not an unthinkable scenario that Yandex will be favouring Garderobe in its search results (after all, without mentioning any names, it has been seen before), fashion retailers without a presence on the platform could potentially leave substantial business on the table.
