Wildberries to launch classifieds service like Avito - paper

MOSCOW. March 10 (Interfax) - Wildberries, one of Russia's largest online marketplaces, has developed a service for selling used goods akin to online classifieds service Avito and plans to launch it in the first half of 2025, business daily Vedomosti reported on Monday, citing sources.

Users of the new service will be able to post ads for used goods for resale. The service is almost ready, the paper's sources said.

Wildberries has posted an ad on a recruitment website for an executive to lead the development team of its new Wildberries Resale business. The ad states that the company is now working on the first version of the product and plans to launch it in the first half of 2025.

Vedomosti reported a spokesman for the merged company Wildberries and Russ (RWB) as saying that the company is considering launching various services for buyers and sellers of its marketplace.

"The company has no plans to launch a classifieds. We believe this model is obsolete," the spokesman said. The company is discussing the "possibility of testing" a resale service for users within Wildberries that would enable them to resell goods purchased on the platform. But this project has not yet gone through the necessary approvals, so it is at the level of an idea, he said.

The company is already launching a new service called WB Track that allows customers to send packages between order pick-up points, the spokesman added.

The service is available on a pilot basis for sending packages from 100 Wildberries pick-up points to Moscow and other regions of Russia. In the coming months the service will begin to rapidly expand to the marketplace's network of pick-up points throughout the country.