Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Quintura blog has this nice post with some statistics of Russian online shoppers - how often they buy, what they buy, and how they pay.  As any other bit of statistics, it’s rather interesting.  However, I think there is more to it than the article covers.  Here are my random thoughts in a bullet list format.

• “85% of Russian Internet users shop online”.  It would be extremely interesting to see at least some approximation of country population to its Internet users.  According to Wikipedia, Russian population is about 142,000,000 people.  How many of these are online?  According to some resources, such as, for example, Public Opinion Foundation Database, it’s somewhere between 18% and 25%.  And then again, it’s depends a lot on where you are looking at.  Moscow and surrounding areas have a much higher Intenret penetration than Central and Eastern Russia.  Moscow can have as much as 56% of its population online, while less than 20% of the Urals and the Siberia population are connected.
• “The Russian e-commerce market has doubled to $3.2 billion in 2007″. Sounds huge, doesn’t it.  But let’s see. I’ll pick 28,000,000 people or 25% of connected population as per Public Opinion Foundation Database for the calculations.  85% of these are shopping online.  That’s about 23,800,000 people.  $3.2 billion market devided equally between all those people comes down to $135.  So, the market is huge, rather because there are so many people around, as opposed to how much those people buy. If you need more numbers to explain you the situation, have a look at the state of the Russian economy at Wikipedia.
• “However, it’s yet to become a habit because only 16% of users shop online once a month”. Sounds like the other 84% shop less than once a month.  Why?  Maybe because it isn’t so easy to find a few people to batch into a single order.  Or maybe they just don’t have time to, between the two jobs or something.
• “Most of the shoppers or 70% paid for online goods in cash upon delivery while only 12% of responders used bank cards in online transactions and another 10% used online payment systems”.  Internationally recognized credit cards, like Visa or MasterCard, are probably either expensive to have or difficult to get or both.  Personally, I don’t have much experience in this area, but I’ve heard a few of my Russian friends complaining about the state of the banking system in the country.  Also, there is another thing to remember - language.  I don’t have any numbers at hand, but I’d say that people who can at least read and understand at least one foreign language are a minority in Russia.  With no credit card and foreign language knowledge, most of the purchasing activity would stay within the country.
• “The most popular shopping items included books (51% of responders), computers (43%), home appliances (42%), software (31%), movies (26%), beauty products (25%), and music (23%)”.  It looks like the majority of Russian online shoppers are rather young, tech-savvy people.
• All of the above make it sound like a lot of marketing opportunities - large number of people, who are roughly in the same age group, with somewhat poor geographic distribution and limited access to credit cards… And with that, it’s interesting to see at the advertising channels.  TV, radio, Internet itself.  And then, which Russian sites with some sort of ad campaigns are the most visited?

Feel free to throw in your thoughts and more numbers via comments.

Via this CyberNet News post I got to Zoomii.com.  There is a saying about all new being well forgotten old.  And that’s exactly what Zoomii.com is about.

There is something magical about walking through a bookshop - touching books, flipping pages.  Especially, when you don’t know exactly what are you looking for.  Amazon has sort of taken it away.  You get in, get your stuff, maybe grab something that is recommended nearby, and leave.   Zoomii.com combines the best of both worlds.  You can still get stuff from Amazon shop at Amazon prices, but instead of visiting a rather cumbersome interface of their site, you can browse through a familiar bookshelf area.

The combination of a good design with intuitive interface makes it almost a “Wow!” site fo me.  It took me exactly three seconds to figure out how to use it.  And even if I wasn’t tech savvy, there is a little friendly popup that appears when entering the site, which tells briefly how to navigate around.  The control panel on the left is small, and has only the things that I care about - navigation, category selector, and information about my cart.  Brilliant.

The only thing that I wish Zoomii.com had that it doesn’t have (or at least I couldn’t find) is the option of choosing which Amazon shop to buy from.  If I could buy directly from Amazon.co.uk, it would be a 10 of 10 web site.  Hope, they will add this option later.

Sites like this should be taught to web designers and developers.  This is how the web should be - clean, simple, efficient, and intuitive.

Long time ago I used to have a wishlist on this site.  If I remember correctly, I even had a few.  It was a rather helpful piece of information for the times when I was doing online shopping, as well as for my friends and family before the big holidays (hint: presents).

There were two problems with keeping up a wishlist.  One was rather small - people couldn’t find it easily, since it was hidden in the archives.  And one big - it was a lot of effort to keep it up-to-date.  I kept losing it myself all the time, and I was always forgetting to update it.   These two problems caused it to finally be lost in the sea of other posts on this blog, and, probably, never to be found again.

I’m glad to say though, that a better version of my wishlist is back.  It’s something that I wish I had years ago.  It’s dead simple, easy to see (no registrations required or anything of such non-sense), and it’s also extremely easy for me to keep updated.  This new wishlist is on del.ishli.st.

The name sounds good, but the link is impossible to remember, much like the original del.icio.us one.  del.ishli.st is a very simple, yet very smart way of wishlisting.  It utilizes my del.icio.us account and the “wishlist” tag, which is something very natural to use for tagging items of the wishlist.  And so that I won’t try to remember the URL, or, even worse, attempt to type it, or lose this wishlist in the history of posts once again, I decided to make a big and important link to it, at the top of the site.  Yes, that’s right, you can see it together with the rest of the main navigational menu.

There are plenty of excellent t-shirts around, but once in a while a brilliant one comes up, which makes all the differences.  Here is one at ThinkGeek.com - nanotechnology is huge !

The moment I saw that phrase appearing in my Google Reader (here is some info about ThinkGeek feeds), I wanted to buy this t-shirt.  Even before I saw the actual t-shirt.  Even despite my total ignorance of nanotechnology.  It’s just so hilarious and true and makes so much sense at the same time!

Here are some assorted points that will hopefully come together once I am finished writing them.

• My mobile - Sony Ericsson P910 - looks very old and much used.
• I got it second hand as a temporary solution.  I have feeling like it was three month ago or so.
• Via “On this day” section of the sidebar, I am reminded of this post.
• The biggest problem with this mobile was the broken keyboard.  A few month ago, I took it off. Now I use virtual keyboard via touch screen.
• The second biggest problem with this phone that I had, was stylus.  I had only one and I lost it.  For a few month now I’m using just my finger.
• I’ve heard about “temporary being the most permanent”.
• A Polish colleague of mine once noted  that most people in Poland drive  very old cars. “A car of 25 years old is like brand new“, - he said.  He was only half joking.
• I am looking for a new mobile phone to buy. I am not in a hurry.
• Google Android stuff sounds very cool, and it will have a lot of future, and I will have one of those.  But they aren’t available yet.
• iPhone is available.
• So is BlackBerry.
• I am not in a hurry.  By the time I will make my mind and decide to do something about my phone, probably Androids will be all over the place.

Yes, I am very slow sometimes.  But even if I am taken out of equation, like with those cars in Poland, there is one argument, which is very very simple, but is very very hard to overcome - “It works“.