After Ukraine’s strike on its warehouses, sellers at Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, try to reclaim their stock and hit a wall marked ‘pickup point overloaded’
Sellers on the Wildberries marketplace whose warehouses were struck by Ukrainian forces this past weekend say they cannot remove their goods from the company’s facilities. The independent Russian investigative outlet Verstka spoke with three entrepreneurs about the problem and found more than 10 similar complaints in specialized chats for Wildberries sellers.
Sellers cannot retrieve their goods from Wildberries warehouses in person, according to Verstka’s sources. The only option is to process a “return” to a pickup point — but since yesterday, the system has been displaying the message “Pickup point is overloaded.” Switching pickup points or reducing the number of items does not resolve the issue.
“At first I thought the pickup point genuinely couldn’t handle the 100 items I had added for return. But then I tried switching pickup points — I went through about 20 different options and combinations, even looking in other cities,” one seller told Verstka — though none of the attempts worked.
Sellers from various regions of Russia have reported the same problem in marketplace chats, and Wildberries has not officially announced any restrictions. Customer support, sellers say, either does not respond or promises to reply “as soon as there is a solution.”
In the early hours of July 18, Ukrainian forces struck Wildberries warehouses in Elektrostal — outside Moscow — and Kotovsk, in the Tambov region. The strikes killed eight people and roughly 80 across the two sites, according to official figures.
It was one of the largest attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the targeted warehouses had been storing drone components.
In early July, Wildberries added a clause to its seller agreement exempting the marketplace from liability in the event of a drone attack. After the strikes on the warehouses in Elektrostal and Kotovsk, Wildberries Chief Executive Tatyana Kim reminded sellers that the company was not obligated to compensate them for lost goods, while offering other measures of financial support.
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