Russia’s largest sporting goods retailer, Sportmaster, has rolled out the country’s first marketplace focused exclusively on the sale of sporting and outdoor goods. The service was launched on Sportmaster’s website in the form of a separate page. The marketplace does not yet have a standalone name, and so far only sellers offering products for hunting and fishing have been able to register in the system. At the time of writing, they have posted around 3,500 items from various categories.
A spokesperson for Sportmaster told Russian news service Shopper that the product range will be expanded significantly in the future. The products offered on the marketplace will not appear in Sportmaster’s offline stores, although customers will be able to pick up the ordered goods at the brick-and-mortar outlets serving as pick-up points.
The Russian press, citing local analysts, reported that Sportmaster is focusing on listing the goods that the company lacks in its portfolio. The analysts believe that the emergence of niche marketplaces built on the basis of online stores will be an important trend in the Russian e-commerce market in the foreseeable future. This trend is largely related to the withdrawal of foreign brands from the country, which has left large gaps that need to be filled, the analysts explained.
Sportmaster originally planned to hire staff to operate a marketplace in January 2023, but the company would not disclose its plans at the time. The company aims to increase the share of online sales to 25 percent, Sergey Agibalov, Senior Manager of Sportmaster, said in the first half of 2023, without providing further details.
