Discounts of marketplaces are asked to be limited to 10%

The Association of Retail Trade Companies (ACORT) has asked the government to limit the ability of marketplaces to set discounts of 30-50% on goods at their own expense.

Local destination: Marketplaces have pointed to inadequate penalties in the new bill

What amounts are we talking about and can this affect the range and prices?

Large retail chains assess this practice as "price dumping", which "leads to unfavorable consequences for sellers, manufacturers, buyers" and the Russian economy as a whole.

If the situation does not change, it will lead to the closure of small and medium-sized offline retail, shopping centers, hypermarkets, ACORT believes. Therefore, retailers are asking to fix in the future law "On platform economy" a provision according to which marketplaces will be prohibited to invest in the price of goods more than 10% of their annual turnover.

"And this means that online marketplaces will be able to display a maximum discount of 10%, a deeper discount will be prohibited," emphasized Artur Gafarov, head of the Institute for the Development of Entrepreneurship and Economics.

Offline trade does not have the opportunity to make a large discount: traditional retail and online platforms differently formalize contractual relations with partners. Stationary networks buy products from suppliers as property and sell them in their own name, ACORT describes in the letter. With this approach, they do not have the opportunity to actively invest in discounts, that is, to significantly reduce the cost of goods at their own expense.

But online marketplaces work with sellers under commission agreements - they are paid for the use of online storefront resources. Marketplaces have the opportunity to participate in the pricing of their partners, ACORT pointed out in the document. Thus, marketplaces invest part of their own funds in reducing the cost of goods that are not their own. In total, investments in price reduction can be comparable to the annual revenue of the online marketplace, federal retailers have calculated.

Read more in the exclusive material of Izvestia:

Promotional irritation: retail asks to limit discounts of marketplaces to 10%