Yandex Kit By 2025, marketplaces had captured a significant share of the market, steadily displacing other sales channels. On the customer side, user behavior around online shopping has shifted markedly in recent years. One of the primary catalysts was the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated the adoption of e-commerce and normalized buying online. There were additional factors. In 2024, it emerged that Google had, over several years, intentionally degraded the quality of search results to increase ad revenue. For younger audiences, this decline reinforced an already emerging behavior: searching for products and information through social platforms such as TikTok. While leadership focused on short-term gains, this shift significantly changed how users discover products—making search outside traditional engines faster and more convenient. Across CIS markets, another driver was the inability of many standalone websites to match the infrastructure and experience offered by marketplaces. Users increasingly expect a clear and predictable journey, reliable support, secure payments, fast delivery, competitive pricing, broad assortments, and frictionless returns. From the merchant perspective, especially across CIS markets, there has been a lack of stable and accessible tools for building and maintaining e-commerce websites. As a result, launching an independent store remained a costly investment with high operational overhead and uncertain ROI. Over time, this led to a sharp decline in the creation of new standalone stores. Together, these factors drove a substantial shift away from the classic product discovery patterns of the 2010s. At first glance, the rise of LLM-based product discovery could have become the final disruption. For companies built on advertising revenue, conversational purchasing flows—where users move directly from dialogue to product—bypass multiple monetization layers. However, this same paradigm introduces an opportunity: to redefine the final decision point in the purchasing journey. It opens the door to alternatives to marketplaces and creates a chance to both preserve existing behaviors and participate in shaping new ones. Meanwhile, marketplace commissions in some categories have reached up to 50%, making certain business models unprofitable. Many merchants have effectively become dependent on these platforms, lacking both the tools and the flexibility to build alternative sales channels. The need is clear: small businesses require a reliable foundation—one that enables them to launch independent sales channels while delivering a user experience on par with marketplaces. That’s why we built Yandex Kit. Yandex Kit is a free technology platform for launching and scaling online stores.