Building a Cross-Border e-Commerce Success Selling to Russia: Bay.Ru CEO Aaron Block (Part 3)

Sramana: It sounds like one of the innovations you have accomplished was creating a wide range of payment options for Russian consumers. Is that a fair statement?

Aaron Block: Yes, definitely. It took a significant amount of work to create all of the payment touch points in a way that resounded with the Russian consumer.

Sramana: Let’s discuss your catalog innovations. When you bring in a catalog from eBay or Amazon, do you find it easy to interface with those catalogs?

Aaron Block: We have built our own catalog via our relationships with wholesalers and manufacturers in the United States. We also present the goods from eBay and Amazon in our catalog. Those two catalogs are collected via APIs. We do real-time search, and those conversations occur directly between our servers. We happen to be a very large buyer of eBay seller goods and Amazon seller goods. We like to think we have a good relationship with them as we help them build their brand and their relationships in Russia.

Sramana: Your customers are not looking at Amazon and eBay websites, are they? They are looking at the Bay.ru website, correct?

Aaron Block: Exactly. They are looking at our website and seeing goods that are, in many cases, sourced from eBay and Amazon. We take the eBay and Amazon catalog information and present it in a truly Russian fashion. We have spent five years doing usability testing and have made plenty of mistakes. We have found a way to present the catalog data and photographs in a way that suits the Russian sensibility. It is the ‘built by Russians, for Russians’ mentality as opposed to the localization of an international site that is another competitive advantage for us.

Sramana: What is special about ‘built by Russians, for Russians’? What are some of the nuances of that phrase?

Aaron Block: The way the shipping is presented is important. Obviously cross-border e-commerce makes shipping difficult. We make the options for shipping very, very clear. How we present the photographs of the goods is different from what you would see with other e-commerce websites. Other sites would consider our methodology to be a bit busy, but usability testing has told us that our methodology works well for us. Catalog integration is something that other people do not do well. We have become good at allowing our users to search for goods across multiple catalogs.

Sramana: When it comes from buying items from wholesalers and owning your own catalog, I can see a very straightforward retail business model. What is the business model behind your integrated catalog?

Aaron Block: The customer pre-pays us 100% of the price of the good. We will then source the good from the appropriate vendor, manufacturer, or retailer depending on where the item was browsed and the reputation and reliability of the seller. Our job is to deliver the end good to the consumer as quickly as we can in its “as described” condition.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Cross-Border e-Commerce Success Selling to Russia: Bay.Ru CEO Aaron Block
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