Ozon, a Russian e-commerce marketplace, has offered sellers the option to store goods at its logistics centers in Almaty and Astana, Kazakhstan, with the company intending to ship orders from there to buyers in Russia. The marketplace also expects this to boost sellers' sales in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan through faster local delivery.
Until September 30, Ozon will not charge sellers separately for transporting goods to Almaty and Astana. There are no volume restrictions for shipments to Kazakhstan — sellers may store any quantity of goods, including large items, at local logistics centers, and the company commits to delivering them both across Russia and Kazakhstan. No additional paperwork is required for sending goods to Kazakh warehouses; sellers only need to submit a standard request and select the appropriate cluster.
Acknowledging that the delivery distance is significantly longer, Ozon calls the resulting delivery times for customers "acceptable." As an example, the marketplace cites Yekaterinburg, where orders from Kazakhstan take an average of four to five days.
The proposal comes amid a series of drone strikes on Russian marketplace warehouses. Ozon's logistics complexes began catching fire on August 22, when drones damaged a facility in Chapayevsk, Samara Region, followed by attacks on warehouses in Krasnodar Krai, Adygea, Dagestan, Orenburg, and Ufa, and on the night of August 30, drones struck Ozon and DNS warehouses near Rostov. Before that, since mid-July, Wildberries infrastructure had been the main target of such attacks.
After strikes on six logistics centers, Ozon promised compensation for damaged goods, waived storage fees at affected warehouses, and cut by three percentage points a previously announced increase in sales tariffs. Additionally, the marketplace removed the addresses of 56 Russian warehouses from its public seller directory. Data on foreign facilities in Astana, Almaty, Minsk, and Yerevan remained in place.