Does Wildberries plan to introduce mandatory prepayment for all customers?

The popular trading platform Wildberries does not plan to make prepayment mandatory for all buyers. The head of the company, Tatyana Bakalchuk, spoke about this in an interview with RIA Novosti.

According to her, to some extent, prepayment on the site is already working: in most cases, goods are sent to other countries only with 100% prepayment. True, when a local warehouse appears in the region, it changes everything.

“In general, we want to make calculations and delivery costs even more flexible, in order to stimulate, among other things, causing less harm to the environment, so that people order from closer warehouses and it is more profitable for sellers to deliver goods to all warehouses,” she noted.

The company is also working to reduce delivery times, she said. In 2023, according to Bakalchuk, these periods have been reduced by several hours.

“We are currently developing two applications that are aimed at ensuring that as many performers as possible are connected and can participate in accelerating our logistics solutions - these are the WB Drive and WB Go platforms. We are also testing a solution for unmanned movement of goods inside the warehouse,” she added.

Answering the question about whether there are plans to tighten the fight against counterfeit goods on the site, Bakalchuk replied that there are only “small percentages or even fractions of a percent” of fake products on the marketplace. But at the same time, work is underway to further minimize counterfeit goods.

“We have a Digital Arbitration system operating in test mode, with the help of which copyright holders can directly interact with other sellers and request relevant documentation from them if they suddenly suspect that their products are counterfeit. In case sellers do not provide supporting documents, such products are removed from the online platform. There are also other programs,” said the head of the company.