Got a global ecommerce play? Russia’s landscape too big to ignore [infographic]

Russia’s ecommerce landscape is best described as a cocktail made up of one part growing middle class, two parts Europe’s most internet users (more than 60 million), and a dash of Russian search engine Yandex. That’s what part one of Search Laboratory‘s two-part series of infographics on Russian’s burgeoning ecommerce scene suggested, and now we have part two.

According to Search Laboratory’s second infographic, Russia is a great ecommerce opportunity for foreign online retailers, but to achieve success such retailers must have an understanding of the dominant search engine in the country: Yandex.

Yandex is a jack of all trades internet company, offering everything from its search engine, to news, shopping (Yandex.Market), mail, maps, payment, music, photos, jobs and traffic. It is, for all intents and purposes, the Google of Russia.

This infographic highlights the importance for ecommerce retailers to be on Yandex, which enjoys a market share in the country of over 60% (Google has 26%), and is also the forth most popular search engine in the world. It is the most viewed entity in Russia, and has 45% of the overall online advertising share — it’s simply too large to ignore if you have a global ecommerce play in mind.

Yandex enjoys 95 million monthly users racking up over 4.8-billion searches every month. Here’s the whopper though, Yandex.Market is set to account for 10% of entire ecommerce sales in 2013. With the market share predicted to be at 75% by 2020, that percentage of entire sales is only set to increase exponentially.

So how do you get your optimisation strategy to work on Yandex? Here’s some key things to know:

Yandex employs human raters who hand-pick some key results, otherwise it ranks websites using the Citation Index method used by Google in offerings such as Google Scholar. Also, Yandex indexes foreign websites for searches typed in English.

Finally, if you want Yandex to like your ecommerce site, there are some key do’s and don’ts:

• Do have relevant links and natural content
• Do have a range of competitively priced products
• Do have a selection of payment and delivery options
• Do have a secure payment process

• Don’t have paid links
• Don’t have pop-up windows and intrusive advertising
• Don’t have machine translations
• Don’t have web spam and ‘artificial’ attempts to optimise

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