On November 1, 2025, Wildberries, the leading Russian online marketplace, announced a six-month freeze on commission rates for all seller models and the cancellation of its inventory index mechanism. The company stated that this decision responds to the need for greater stability and predictability under current market conditions, positioning the move as a measure to support its seller base amid ongoing volatility in the e-commerce sector. The freeze comes into effect immediately, while the abolition of the inventory index—an algorithmic metric assessing sellers' inventory turnover and penalizing slow-moving stock—took place on the same date.
The inventory index was introduced by Wildberries in September 2025 and quickly became a source of contention. Sellers with low index scores were forced to discount, pay higher storage fees, or remove products from Wildberries' fulfillment centers. Numerous complaints were filed with the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service, culminating in a regulatory mandate to amend these internal rules by late October 2025. Industry associations pointed to the pressure of rising commissions at both Wildberries and major competitors, fueling calls for regulators to stabilize conditions for merchants.
E-commerce Ecosystem Impact
This development stands out as a structural inflection point for Russian e-commerce. By freezing commissions and disbanding the inventory index, Wildberries signals a recalibration in platform governance. The commission freeze provides sellers with a rare window of operational predictability, mitigating risks linked to abrupt fee hikes seen elsewhere in the sector, as some competitors have raised commissions multiple times in the preceding year. According to multiple sources, these moves are widely interpreted as a bid to sustain merchant loyalty and prevent further migration in a highly competitive marketplace environment.
The abolition of the inventory index holds equally significant implications for e-commerce infrastructure. The index, designed to optimize warehouse turnover and assortment freshness, imposed heavy compliance burdens on merchants—requiring meticulous tracking of stock movement and product popularity. With its cancellation, sellers regain flexibility in inventory management strategies, potentially choosing longer-tail assortment approaches or optimizing for margin over velocity. However, the risk remains that warehouse space could become less optimized, necessitating technological or procedural adaptations elsewhere in the supply chain.
Data Flows and Catalog Infrastructure
Inventory management algorithms like the decommissioned index are deeply integrated with content and data flows in e-commerce environments. Product feeds—dynamic databases transmitted from seller IT systems to the marketplace—must often encode not only price and quantity, but also sales projections, expiry dates, and promotional participation. The removal of inventory-linked penalties will likely simplify feed structure requirements for a wide class of sellers, reducing the number of attributes that must be programmatically updated in near real-time. This streamlining could lower the barrier to entry for small and medium-sized businesses, empowering vendors who rely on no-code solutions or cloud-based SaaS tools for feed generation. No longer needing to engineer complex logic for index compliance, merchants can devote development resources to catalog enrichment, attribute expansion, or cross-platform listing strategies.
In turn, catalog standardization—key to facilitating comparison shopping, bundling, and automated promotions—stands to benefit. With fewer forced clearance sales and less urgent inventory offloading, product pages can focus on comprehensive content and rich media rather than flash-deals or limited-time scarcity signals. This shift may, over time, promote higher-quality product listings, as suppliers can shift effort from tactical price manipulation toward robust content development and structured data enhancement. For more information on creating compelling listings, see our blog on How to Create Sales-Driving Product Descriptions Without Spending a Fortune - NotPIM.
Assortment Scaling and Speed-to-Market
A principal effect of abolishing punitive inventory measures is the acceleration of assortment expansion. Entry barriers for slow-turning or niche products are reduced, opening the field for long-tail goods and experimental launches, as sellers are no longer pressed to guarantee rapid sell-through or penalized for speculative inventory deployment. This could push Wildberries' catalog toward even greater breadth, challenging operational capacity in warehousing and fulfillment, but offering consumers a richer discovery experience.
From a technological standpoint, the simplification of compliance criteria enables faster onboarding and activation of new SKUs. Partners deploying advanced AI-driven content automation or using low-code onboarding tools can adapt workflows rapidly, focusing on content completeness, taxonomy alignment, and accurate attribute mapping. Previous index-driven workflows—such as calculating price elasticity, storage risk, and promotion triggers—can be deprecated or refactored for more strategic objectives, like market testing or AI-powered product recommendation.
Role of Automation and AI
Automation and AI technologies will likely see shifting roles in sellers’ and the platform’s daily operations in response to these policy changes. Where index compliance previously forced the automation of pricing, discounting, and inventory prediction, the new environment enables reallocation of these resources. Merchants may invest in AI content enrichment, automated image optimization, or enhanced customer support systems. Similarly, marketplaces like Wildberries can refine internal algorithms to focus more on demand forecasting, personalized search, and fraud prevention, leveraging freed-up computational and analytical capacity.
Additionally, as entry-level sellers and boutiques gain footing, the demand for accessible, no-code SaaS solutions will rise. The lowered process burden encourages adoption of plug-and-play feed management platforms, modern PIM systems (product information management), and catalog optimization suites that abstract away marketplace complexity. Rapid prototyping and A/B testing of new assortment, previously hampered by the risk of punitive storage charges, become feasible at scale. For companies looking to optimize their product data feeds, using a Delta Feed - NotPIM can save valuable resources.
Market Context and Regulatory Overhang
The commission freeze and abandonment of inventory penalties coincide with a broader regulatory and competitive recalibration in Russian e-commerce. Both the Federal Antimonopoly Service and leading market associations have debated the acceptable bounds of platform control and merchant autonomy. The decision by Wildberries can be interpreted as partial compliance with regulatory directives, but also as a preemptive move in anticipation of further oversight and to maintain platform stability.
The backdrop includes major players raising seller fees and leveraging aggressive discounting engines to drive customer acquisition, often at merchant expense. Wildberries’ shift toward predictable commissions and relaxed inventory controls can be read as an attempt to differentiate its value proposition in favor of merchants, particularly those at risk of marginalization by ever-changing fulfillment and pricing mandates. Understanding the importance of a product feed is crucial for success in e-commerce.
Strategic Outlook
Wildberries’ recent moves are likely to set a precedent in e-commerce ecosystem governance. The effects will reverberate across product data infrastructure, seller onboarding strategies, assortment planning, and feed automation workflows. While warehouse and fulfillment optimization may require adaptation, the overall direction points toward greater commercial flexibility, enhanced content quality, and increased reliance on digital automation.
For market participants, the next six months offer a critical window for testing expanded catalogs, retooling content systems, and piloting AI-powered merchandising in a less punitive, more predictable operational framework. Long-term impacts will depend on actual warehouse load dynamics, competitive responses, and regulatory developments. Nonetheless, the move marks a shift toward a more open and innovation-friendly content environment within the Russian e-commerce sector, reflecting both market pressure and evolving platform strategies.
Related reading: Vedomosti, Retailer.ru
In light of Wildberries' changes, we anticipate a greater emphasis on product content quality and detailed catalog management. With less pressure on rapid inventory turnover, brands can invest in richer product descriptions, enhanced media, and more accurate attribute data. This shift aligns perfectly with the core capabilities of NotPIM, which offers tools for simplifying data feed management, enriching product information, and ensuring consistency across all sales channels. We see this as an opportunity for e-commerce businesses to optimize their product data, ultimately leading to improved product discoverability and increased sales.