The Local Shortage Effect:
How to Sell on Ozon at a Higher Price Than Your Competitors Using a Regional Warehouse Fragmentation Strategy Automatic translate

Most sellers perceive the marketplace as a unified digital space with a fixed price for a product. They see a competitor selling a vacuum cleaner for 5,000 rubles and feel obligated to set the price at 4,900. This linear logic ignores the platform’s fundamental architecture. Ozon is not a monolithic store, but a federated network of distributed warehouses, where each logistics cluster functions as a separate local market with its own balance of supply and demand.

The price a seller sees in their personal account or during a quick search from Moscow often bears no resemblance to what a buyer sees in Novosibirsk or Krasnodar. The platform’s ranking algorithms have evolved. Delivery speed now influences search rankings as much as price. Buyer psychology has also changed: customers would rather pay 200-300 rubles more for an item that arrives tomorrow than wait a week for a package from a central warehouse at a reduced price.

This is where opportunities for maneuver arise. To discover these opportunities, it’s not enough to simply look at the average hospital price. A professional approach requires analyzing search results from users in different geographic locations. Ozon’s precise price monitoring , configured to simulate queries from specific regions, allows you to see the true picture of the competition. You might discover that a competitor offering low prices is only available in a warehouse in Khorugvino, while the shelves in Yekaterinburg are empty, allowing you to sell the same product at a significantly higher price.

Mechanics of regional priority

Product ranking on Ozon is based on the principle of minimizing logistical leverage. It’s unprofitable for the platform to ship cheap goods across the country — this eats into the marketplace’s margins and burdens its main supply chains. Therefore, a local seller always gets a head start. If your product is stored in an FBO warehouse in the "Siberia" cluster, and a competitor’s product is in the "Center" cluster, then for a buyer in Omsk, your product will be ranked higher, even if your price is 10-15% higher.

This markup isn’t speculative in the negative sense. It covers your expenses for freezing working capital in various locations across the country and cross-docking costs. The buyer, however, pays for the service — for the opportunity to receive the goods "here and now." The mistake many entrepreneurs make is trying to set a single "fair" price for the entire country, focusing on the most competitive region of Moscow. As a result, they lose profits in regions with less competitive pressure.

Working with the price index, which the marketplace constantly warns its partners about, also has its own nuances. The index is often calculated based on global data or data from major retailers. However, local shortages outweigh the index’s impact. If your product is the only one in a specific cluster with "tomorrow" delivery, the system will still show it to the buyer, since the lack of an alternative makes price comparison secondary.

Warehouse geography as a pricing tool

Let’s examine the structure of logistics clusters. Ozon divides its coverage map into zones: Central, South, Volga, Ural, Siberia, Far East, and others. Each cluster has its own capacity and order processing cost. The warehouse fragmentation strategy involves shifting from shipping all shipments to central hubs (Khorugvino, Novaya Riga) to distributing shipments among regional fulfillment centers.

With this arrangement, you create an artificial local monopoly. Let’s say you sell gardening supplies. During the peak season, competition in Moscow is off the charts, and prices drop to breakeven. But if you pre-ship a batch to Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar, you’ll be in a high-demand zone with minimal delivery lead time. Competitors who only operate FBS (from their own warehouse) or ship only to Moscow lose out on delivery times of 3-5 days. Buyers are willing to pay a premium for these days.

It’s important to consider the economics of cross-docking. Delivering goods to a regional warehouse through the marketplace costs money. The cost depends on the volume (capacity) and the type of drop-off point. The calculation should be based on the unit economics of a specific shipment: will the additional markup (say, +150 rubles to the receipt) offset the logistics costs to the cluster? For goods with a high average receipt or high turnover, the answer is almost always yes. For low-cost, small items, the strategy requires more careful calculations and the use of boxed rather than palletized deliveries to optimize costs.

The danger of residual averaging

One of the main risks when working with a marketplace is blurring of focus. When a seller sees a general sales report, they’re looking at average sales figures. They might not notice that 80% of profits are generated not by Moscow, where turnover is huge but margins are peanuts, but by the Urals and Volga regions, where sales are less frequent but net profit per unit is higher.

A product’s lack of inventory in a regional warehouse is a lost opportunity that’s hard to spot. If you have zero inventory in Kazan, you simply disappear from search results for millions of users in Tatarstan, or fall to the bottom of the list with "4-day delivery." A competitor with even minimal inventory there can steal that traffic without a fight. They can charge a higher price than you, and they’ll still sell.

Analyzing competitors’ blind spots becomes a tactical advantage. If you notice that a major player has fled a region (running out of inventory at their local warehouse), this is a signal for aggression. At this point, you can raise prices in that specific cluster. Managing prices by cluster on Ozon isn’t as straightforward as one would like, but it can be addressed through promotion management or creating duplicate cards for different operating schemes (although the platform discourages the latter and requires caution).

Technical implementation of crushing

The product distribution process requires a revision of the purchasing strategy. Instead of a single large monthly purchase, we must switch to more frequent and smaller deliveries. This increases the operational workload for managers and the warehouse. Different deliveries must be prepared for different cross-docking destinations.

Particular attention should be paid to packaging and labeling. Palletization errors are more costly for regional warehouses. If goods are rejected at the receiving facility in Novosibirsk, return or disposal will become a headache. Therefore, prepacking standards must be stricter than for deliveries to the nearest Moscow warehouse, where the problem can be quickly resolved.

The approach to inventory management is also changing. Goods stored in Khabarovsk may sell more slowly than in Moscow. This is frozen cash. The balance between sales speed and high margins is a fine line. You can’t simply spread inventory evenly across all warehouses. Demand analysis is needed. There’s no point in shipping the same volumes of winter tires or shovels to Krasnodar as to Siberia. But air conditioners will sell sooner and at a higher price in the south.

Pricing strategies and promotions

Participating in Ozon promotions often becomes onerous for sellers due to the deep discount requirements. However, the availability of goods in regional warehouses allows for selective participation or reduced losses. If your base price in the region is initially higher (due to the logistics premium), the discount required by the marketplace to participate in the promotion will be calculated based on this higher base price.

Essentially, you can sell a discounted product at a price equal to a competitor’s regular retail price in Moscow, but still receive a traffic boost from participating in the sale. This is a legal way to maintain profit margins while formally adhering to the platform’s rules. Buyers see a crossed-out price tag and a promotional icon, which increases conversion, and you maintain an acceptable profit margin.

Furthermore, Ozon’s algorithms often offer different promotional terms for different categories and regions. Flexibility in stock management allows for flexibility. You can exclude Moscow stock from the promotion if it’s selling at a loss, but retain regional stock where the margin allows for a discount.

Competition at the Last Mile level

The battle for customers is shifting from the global level to the "last mile" level. The closest one wins. This is reminiscent of classic retail: a neighborhood store can sell bread at a higher price than a hypermarket on the outskirts simply because it’s nearby. Ozon has digitized this model.

Sellers operating under the FBS (full-service base) model often lose out in this race if their warehouse is located in only one city. Even if they ship orders promptly, the time required for long-distance delivery adds to the lead time. FBO (full-service base) with nationwide distribution wins in terms of speed. The only chance for an FBS seller to compete regionally is to use the RFBS model with fulfillment partners in multiple cities, but this requires a complex organizational structure.

For most small and medium-sized businesses, using the marketplace’s infrastructure via cross-docking remains the most accessible way to scale. This allows you to turn logistics disadvantages (long distances) into protection against competitors. A Moscow-based dumper simply won’t reach your customer in Irkutsk with the same efficiency.

Economy of local shortages

Local shortages arise spontaneously and regularly. Logistics chains are imperfect, trucks are delayed, warehouses are overloaded. During these moments, prices in a given region can take on a life of their own, divorced from national trends. A product that costs next to nothing in the center due to oversupply can become a gold mine in the outskirts.

Monitoring such anomalies requires constant attention. You can’t set up supplies once and forget about it. Seasonality in our country arrives unevenly. Spring arrives in the South a month earlier than in the Center, and two months earlier than in the North. By distributing the flow in waves, following climate change, we can skim the cream of demand at the highest price in each region in turn.

This transforms marketplace trading from passive income to active inventory trading. You move liquidity to where it’s most in demand. Risks increase, as an error in the weather or demand forecast will result in paid storage of illiquid assets thousands of kilometers away. But it’s precisely this risk that the market pays a higher premium for.

Storage cost factor

When calculating the effectiveness of regional expansion, storage fees cannot be ignored. Ozon offers grace periods, but they are not indefinite. If goods are stuck in a remote warehouse, transporting them back is economically pointless — logistics will eat into the cost of the goods. The only solution is an aggressive sale, at break-even or below.

Therefore, you should begin splitting your warehouses with test batches. Don’t send a pallet to a market where you haven’t yet tested its capacity. Send a few boxes. Evaluate the washout rate. If the goods are gone within a week, you can scale up the delivery. This iterative approach will prevent funds from being tied up in inventory, which will then become dead weight on your balance sheet somewhere in Samara.

It’s also important to consider the product category. Bulk and inexpensive items (for example, cheap plastic containers) are extremely sensitive to logistics costs. Their regional markup may be too high for the buyer. However, compact electronics, cosmetics, or dietary supplements are ideal for this strategy: logistics contribute little to their price, and buyers are highly sensitive to delivery times.

Adaptation to algorithm changes

Marketplace algorithms are a fluid environment. Ozon regularly adjusts its weighting coefficients: today price is more important, tomorrow it’s speed, and the day after, it’s listing conversion. However, the physical proximity of the product to the buyer will always be a fundamental factor. No algorithm can teleport a product. Therefore, relying on geographic distribution is strategically more reliable than playing with review manipulation or SEO-optimized descriptions.

Investing in logistics creates a long-term asset — a sales structure. A product listing may be blocked, a description may be downgraded, but if your product is physically on a shelf in a city near the customer, you have a huge advantage over any virtual competitor. This is the foundation of a business, which is more difficult to destroy simply by changing search ranking rules.

By working across regions, you also diversify risks. A decline in demand in one region can be offset by growth in another. This makes the business model more resilient to local economic fluctuations or aggressive competitors in a particular cluster. You no longer rely on a single entry point or distribution outlet.