Page 56 - bneMag February 2021_20210202

56 I Eastern Europe bne February 2021
Photos: www.magnit.com
the post by Severgroup of steel tycoon Alexei Mordashov, who also has retail ambitions.)
“The e-commerce has started but
in the short term we are looking for customer insights. It’s what we need:
to better understand our consumers,” says Dunning. “Magnit has no choice. We have to be digital and we need an e-commerce platform and by next year we will be an active e-commerce player.”
Amongst the first changes Dunning made was to introduce a customer loyalty card in September 2019 to begin collecting information on customers' shopping habits.
Dunning says that Magnit has always concentrated on procurement to present the best customer value proposition. Now he wants to turn the relationship around and listen and learn from the customers for more insights on appealing prices, product ranges and private labels.
“It’s customer-centric thinking. We
are not there yet but we are making progress,” says Dunning. “We have to re-orientate from procurement and fancy stores. We need to know what the customer wants, how to present it, and how they want to pick it up. That last part is new: there are more aspects to retail now as it is changing very fast. What used to take 20 years to change now changes in five years.”
Delivery options
One of the biggest changes in Russian retail in recent years is the possibility
of having your groceries delivered to your home rather than trekking down
to the store with an avoska, the string shopping bag everyone used to carry in Soviet times in case there was something to buy in the shops.
The company started with food deliveries in August and in September followed up with the launch of e-pharmacy and an e-grocery delivery service in partnership with e-commerce firms Delivery Club and Yandex.Eda the marketplace owned by Russia’s internet powerhouse Yandex. The tie-up with
Like everyone else, Magnit is also invest- ing in its own delivery and logistic system. In November the company launched the Magnit Dostavka (Delivery) app, which will support the e-commerce effort. Ini- tially available in Moscow inside the major MKAD ring road it carries 5,000 products that can be delivered in under 60 minutes. The pilot has been set up in partnership with Yandex.Eda, the food delivery service of Russia’s internet giant. In the same month deliveries from hypermarkets in the company’s home region of Krasno- dar were added and more will follow.
Cosmetics is a first step to expanding deliveries from the company’s drogerie format. The e-pharmacy draws on over
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“The e-commerce has started but in the short term we are looking for customer insights:
to better understand our consumers”
e-commerce is natural, as all the serious players have already invested heavily
in distribution and logistics to support their own businesses.
The tie-up with Delivery Club is also being used for express delivery of cosmetics from the company’s cosmetics subsidiary. A pilot was launched
in Yekaterinburg and Krasnodar in December and will be expanded to major cities where Magnit operates in 2021.
100 pharmacies in Moscow and offers
a 30-minute pick-up period at the nearest store to the customer. A courier service for over-the-counter items is also in the works.
The company is also in the process of setting up “dark stores” that have no walk-in customers, as they are there to fulfil online orders quickly. But Dunning says that currently the main appeal of the online platforms is the insight they give into customers’ behaviour.