Wildberries sellers complain to Russian prime minister over delayed payments. Marketplace blames DDoS attack.
Sellers on the Wildberries marketplace have appealed to the head of Russia’s government, asking him to look into delayed payments for goods already sold, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported.
Andrei Pasynkov, president of the Association of Marketplace Sellers, sent a letter to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in early August. According to the association, 95.6% of sellers had not received the funds they were owed for the last week of July, even though payments were due by the end of August. The organization put the total amount at stake at about 20 billion rubles.
The association has asked the government to intervene, the Federal Antimonopoly Service to investigate, and the Federal Tax Service to account for the cash flow gaps sellers now face.
Wildberries, for its part, said it has paid most sellers, though payments to some businesses have indeed been delayed.
The marketplace blamed the delays on DDoS attacks against its “Seller Balance” system, saying its protective mechanisms can temporarily halt processing of certain fund-transfer operations, meaning some requests take longer than usual, according to Wildberries representatives. The company said “all sellers’ funds are safe and are transferred once the necessary technical procedures are completed.”
Market representatives told the outlet that, based on their information, the delays in payments to Wildberries sellers are not systemic, though they warned that continued disruption could hurt both the sellers and the marketplace’s own operations.
Since mid-June, Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Wildberries’ largest warehouses with drone strikes across various regions of Russia. By early August, the damage to the marketplace and its sellers from those strikes was estimated at hundreds of billions of rubles.
In late August, the Russian government approved support measures for Wildberries sellers affected by the warehouse strikes, as well as for the marketplace itself, including a tax deferral.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.