Owners of pick-up points (POIs) and Wildberries sellers are filing lawsuits against this company en masse. This was announced on April 13 at a meeting with State Duma deputies by Alexander Efimov, CEO of the law firm Fox Legal Consulting (he represents the interests of marketplace partners). This is also confirmed by the data of the database of arbitration courts. According to SPARK-Interfax, since the beginning of 2023, more than 400 applications for 560 million rubles have been submitted to Wildberries. For comparison: in terms of money, this is slightly less than it was for the entire last year: the total amount of claims then amounted to 640 million rubles. Most of them (about 300) are related to the fulfillment of obligations under contracts, in particular agency and commission agreements, they are initiated by sellers and owners of pickup points, explains Efimov. He adds that in about half of the cases, companies dispute the fines accrued by marketplace bots, and in the rest they dispute their responsibility for lost or damaged goods.
Representatives of the PVZ themselves at a meeting in the State Duma confirmed the existence of such lawsuits, but advised them to contact Yefimov for details.
Conflict over fines
The dispute between the owners of Wildberries and the PVZ began in mid-March due to the introduction of fines for the latter for returning goods due to marriage or substitution. Some outlet owners went on strike, including at the central office of the marketplace. As a result, the site announced the closure of those outlets whose owners “choose uncivilized forms of dialogue.” But soon the deputies of the State Duma and the Ministry of Labor intervened in the conflict, after which Wildberries agreed to freeze about 10,000 fines, while the site closed the official chat with the sellers, where they could receive prompt answers from the support service, explaining this by an increase in the number of scammers who presented themselves as employees of the marketplace.
“The increase in the number of lawsuits against the site is formal and is associated solely with an increase in the scale of work and the number of partners it has in various areas,” a Wildberries representative said. According to him, this is a natural statistic for any dynamically growing company. In addition, lawsuits are ongoing on various aspects of business and no growth is recorded depending on the type of dispute, the source of Vedomosti says, adding that only 10–15 of the partner pickup points expressed dissatisfaction, which is approximately 0.1% of their total number. “Therefore, it is inappropriate to talk about any mass character on their part,” the Wildberries representative sums up, adding that not a single class action lawsuit has been filed on their part.
Other marketplaces, which have previously also reported growth in business and revenue, do not have such a number of lawsuits this year. For example, from January to March of this year, only 72 applications were submitted to arbitration courts against the second largest Internet retailer in Russia, Ozon, in the amount of about 52 million rubles. Although for the whole of last year there were 160 such disputes – for 452.9 million rubles. The main claims concerned contracts for the provision of services and supplies. In 2023, 168 lawsuits were filed against Yandex.Market, 7 against Sbermegamarket, 1 against Kazan Express, and none against Aliexpress Russia. The reason that created such unsightly statistics for Wildberries was “the unmotivated application of liability measures by the marketplace to its partners,” said Anastasia Shumilina, senior lawyer at Legal Aid, who represented the interests of sellers at a meeting in the State Duma with Opora Rossii and with representatives of marketplaces in early April .
An Ozon spokesperson says that this marketplace has no pickup penalties, which explains the low number of lawsuits. “We check the path of the goods along the entire chain, from the seller or our warehouse to the buyer, and only as a result of the investigation is a decision made on the responsibility of one party or another,” says a representative of the online retailer.
“Yandex.Market” regularly holds meetings with sellers and owners of pickup points, collects wishes from partners and takes them into account when finalizing services, adds a representative of this marketplace. Sbermegamarket and Aliexpress Russia did not provide comments.
The situation with the substitution of goods has become a big problem for the employees of the pickup point, since they, in fact, have shifted responsibility for the operation of the entire Wildberries supply chain, says Leo Shevchenko, general director of the Mercatus seller school. According to him, in case of any mistake, they must compensate all expenses at their own expense, and this is unfair, since the order must be checked along the entire chain and responsibility for it should be shared between the parties.
Lawyers interviewed by Vedomosti say that it is not easy for the owners of the PVZ to seek justice in the courts. The courts do not yet understand how the relationship between partners and Wildberries is built, what is an offer, who is the strong side of the contract, etc., says Boris Bashilov, senior partner at the law firm Bashilov, Noskov and Partners. But this trend, in his opinion, will soon change, as it has already happened with microcredit organizations that prescribed rates of thousands of percent in contracts until the Central Bank stopped this.
Efimov, on the other hand, assures that in most cases the partners manage to obtain a refund, but each time they have to prove in court that the marketplace is the strong side of the agreement, which imposed certain conditions unilaterally, including fines.
The courts can take the side of the PVZ owners and sellers in certain disputes, but in order to amend the offer agreements and ban fines, state regulation of the industry is needed, Bashilov believes.
Amendments to the bill, which establishes the rules by which sites will be able to impose fines on their counterparties, are already being considered in the State Duma.
