An international online auction, eBay has withdrawn from the Russian Association of Internet Trading Companies (AKIT).
The reason is clear: all AKIT members, except for "eBay Russia", support the government's initiative to lower the threshold for duty-free online purchases abroad. The association even sent a letter to the president aleatherg to speed up the process of adopting the new law.
A year and a half ago, becoming a member of AKIT, eBay announced its intentions to develop the Russian e-commerce market, establish rules on a par with other participants, work to increase confidence in the Internet trading industry, promised to share its experience with partners and adhere to the principles on which the company was founded eBay.
The market suggests that the last point in the disagreement between AKIT and eBay could be the words of the Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukaev about the final decision to set the threshold for duty-free online trading at 500 euro.
Over the past five months, the head of the Russian representative office of eBay has repeatedly stated his divergence of views with AKIT. eBay Russia sent a letter of intent to withdraw from the Association.
There is information that eBay Russia sent a letter of intent to leave the Association in September. The head of the Russian division of eBay, Vladimir Dolgov, confirmed the fact of writing the letter. He called the exit "a done deal," although some formalities may have remained. There is no connection with Ulyukaev's statements, according to Dolgov. "It's like linking our exit with the warm weather that was established in due time," he said.
The idea of lowering the threshold for duty-free shopping is very popular with representatives of Russian e-commerce, who find it difficult to compete with foreign merchants both in terms of prices and in terms of the range of products. Representatives of Russian e-commerce have raised this issue more than once at various levels. For example, in the summer, the general director of Ozon, Maelle Gave, at a meeting with Vladimir Putin, said that the Russian budget annually loses 98 billion rubles due to "too liberal legislation" regarding cross-border Internet commerce.
On the other hand, eBay has repeatedly stated that this approach is unbalanced, since any Russian citizen, having flown in from abroad, can carry a suitcase with goods worth up to € 10 through customs at the airport duty-free. In addition, this law obviously hits the auction itself, since the goods that Russians buy from any foreign seller represented on the eBay platform, in theory, will also fall under the introduced threshold, which is likely to reduce the number of orders and turnover.
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