The largest player in the Russian Internet commerce market in terms of turnover in the retail segment in 2012 was the seller of household appliances and electronics, Citylink, with revenue of 18.9 billion rubles (excluding VAT), according to a ranking compiled by the Enter strategic research center.

"Citilink", a project of the Merlion distribution group, does not disclose its revenue. Enter named it with an error of 15%, says Sergey Makhomet, marketing director of "Citilink", without giving any other details. The company's turnover, according to him, has grown by 87% over the past year.

Last year's leader of the ranking, the company "Yulmart", which took third place this year (its turnover is estimated at 14.3 billion rubles), does not agree with the reshuffle. The company's revenue according to management reporting for 2012 was approximately 20.8 billion rubles without VAT, said the company's CEO Alexey Nikitin. "Yulmart" is larger than "Citilink", according to the co-owner of the Wikimart project Maxim Faldin.

Enter has created a ranking of Russian e-commerce market players based on an analysis of available company reports and its own assessment of their activities, says Enter CEO Sergey Rumyantsev. Internet retail is an opaque industry, many players do not disclose their figures, so analysts' assessments may differ significantly, explains Mikhail Burmistrov, director of Infoline Analytics. His company differs from Enter in its assessment of many Internet resources. For example, Enter placed the Exist.ru spare parts store in second place in the ranking with revenue of 14.7 billion rubles, while Infoline estimates the turnover of this company at 9.5 billion rubles. Utkonos, which received 4th place in Enter's ranking with revenue of 8.7 billion rubles, according to Infoline, reduced its sales to 5.8 billion rubles in 2012. The companies themselves do not comment on their financial indicators.

Both Enter and Infoline agree that the main turnover in online retail is made by stores specializing in the sale of household appliances and electronics. Among the 25 largest online retailers according to Enter, 12 were "technical" specialists, and another six were mixed-product traders. One of the fastest-growing segments, clothing and footwear trade, is represented by only four players: Otto Group with its Otto.ru and Quelle.ru stores took sixth place, Wildberries.ru and KupiVIP.ru - 10th and 11th places, and Boutique.ru - 24th place. At least three large clothing retailers were not included in the Enter ranking - Lamoda.ru with revenue of 3.3 billion rubles, Laredoute.ru (3 billion) and Club-sale.ru (2.2 billion rubles), says Burmistrov. The company does not have data on their turnover, explains the Enter representative.

The minimum threshold for entering the Enter ranking is 1.5 billion rubles; with such revenue, the last place was taken by the Zakazi store.

"Electronics is the oldest category, it was the beginning of online trading," explains Sotmarket CEO Vsevolod Strakh. At the same time, he says, it is the most competitive segment of the online market, so sales growth is slow. "Equipment is the largest and most capacious segment of the market, and this state of affairs will continue for a very long time, because electronics are really more convenient to buy online," Faldin believes.

A laptop is more important than trousers