Innovations that lead to digital dominance in the car tire market: the experience of Alexei Shastov

- Alexey, the All-Russian Digital Leaders Award recognized your talent as an entrepreneur in the field of digital commerce. You received the award along with digital giants such as Sberbank, Kaspersky Lab, Skillbox and others. What is this award for you: top or springboard?

"I'd rather compare it to a lighthouse. The winners were key players representing various sectors of the domestic economy. The expert council noted my company in the nomination "Project in Business," in the category "E-Commerce." My project was assessed as having made a significant contribution to the development of digital solutions and online services. This means that we have the right course: we successfully solve various problems of business digitalization, for example, such as optimization of customer experience and others.

"This is not your first reward. In 2020 and 2022, you twice became a laureate of the annual All-Russian intersectoral competition "The best enterprise in the industry." Tell me, where did your path in entrepreneurship begin?

• I tried myself in different directions and did not immediately come to the digital sale of tires. In the late nineties - early 2000s, I was engaged in various unrelated businesses, for example, we assembled wired telephones with a number identifier. Education came in handy here - I graduated from the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics. I also tried myself in fast food, opening a small food business - in the Southern Administrative District I had a network of tents for the production and sale of donuts. I started working on tires in 2003, making the first site - the online store for the sale of tires and discs "Покрышка.ру." It was a one-page site that had only a logo and contact numbers. To get customers, we laid out our flyers on the windshields of cars. So more and more people gradually learned about us, and the company began to grow.

- The site helped to make popular a unique service at that time, which allows you to select the types and sizes of tires and discs according to the brand of the car, as well as a tire calculator. Why just a site with a catalog did not satisfy you and how did you develop these services?

• The Internet in those years was just beginning to gain popularity, but having created a site, we were immediately able to see the potential for business in it. I felt I could make buying tyres comfortable and transparent for everyone, and for that one catalog is scarce, so as the company grew, I invested in developing handy tools and was never afraid to experiment. Our tire and disc service was really unique at the time. We worked on combining many catalogs, analyzed and converted measurement systems and markings used by various manufacturers, wheels and tires. We were the first to create a tire calculator and made it as convenient as possible - it allows you not only to choose the necessary tire size from existing ones, but also to understand, including visually, how the external dimensions of the wheel will change when changing one tire size to another. It also shows how the car's clearance and speedometer readings will change.

- Now you have one of the leading bus-themed online stores in Russia - according to the SimilarWeb service, only in October, when everyone urgently remembers winter, the site was visited by more than 800 thousand users. What solutions help you keep the service level?

We have built a strong team of like-minded people in which every person is valued for their contribution and has the opportunity to grow. Each step in our development was aimed at making the process of choosing and buying tires as convenient and fast as possible. Our goal is not just to sell the product, but to create value for customers, to offer them better experience and service. We have developed and launched an online customer consultation service, introduced a speech synthesis function on the site, which helps to get acquainted with the characteristics of the product without distracting the driver from the road. We worked separately on logistics, developing a unique technology for interacting with suppliers, which allows you to provide a huge range of goods in the store. Also, thanks to it, more than 90 percent of all goods are delivered within 24 hours after placing an order. They made free delivery of tires for residents of Moscow. Our active customers are buyers throughout Russia and the near abroad.

- Selection of tires and discs according to the brand of the car, tire calculator - your company has always managed to outstrip competitors in innovations that they later adopted. How hard is it to be first, and how do you feel about those who copy you?

• It is always difficult to be the first - there is no one to take an example from. It was impossible to just take a ready-made solution, you had to come up with everything yourself. But this turned into the main force of our company - into an innovative approach and attention to the little things - that put us outside the general race for customers. And now all the services we have created have been copied by competitors, which is easy to check in the "Web Archive" service by the dates of the appearance of certain pages. But there is also a reverse medal of such leadership. Our fame is used by scammers - almost every year they create fake pages similar to our site and deceive people. To protect against them, we received a patent for our site as a computer program, but unfortunately, this does not help much, fake sites continue to appear - this circumstance harms the reputation of our company.

- Your company has been successfully operating in digital commerce for 20 years, creating trends in several e-commerce sites. What technologies do you now consider promising?

"For us, everything starts with understanding the needs of our customers and ends with the introduction of technologies that can best meet these needs. Therefore, I see a great future in digital analysis of big data, thanks to which we can even more accurately predict customer needs and optimize our stocks and logistics. The tire calculator and handy tyre selection catalogue is just the tip of the iceberg. I also implement these and other approaches in my other projects, for example, in the popular online store 'Mattress Market', which is visited by several thousand people a day in search of high-quality mattresses, pillows and beds. Digital technologies also allow you to immediately calculate the cost and time of delivery anywhere in Russia and neighboring countries. We plan to further develop our platform and enter new markets.

- Tell me, what changes in your niche of digital commerce are happening now, and how do you see the future of this direction?

• Globalization of e-commerce continues in Russia. Marketplaces came to the market - players with huge financial capabilities. This seriously complicates the work of private companies like ours. But we have our own trump cards - this is the technical difficulty of selecting tires and discs. We are professionals in this direction and we have our time-tested services and experienced workers. Marketplaces do not yet cope with this task, and perhaps do not really want to. They can just sell the wheels, but they can't, and buyers often do not know what exactly they need. In general, the tire and auto goods industry will continue to develop in the direction of digitalization. In the future, we will see even closer integration of online and offline services, which we are also actively working on.

Author: Evgenia Nikolaeva