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The Minister in charge of Trade of the Eurasian Economic Commission made this statement in his speech at the "Cross-border E-commerce: Development Scenarios" session of SPIEF-2022, emphasizing the importance of ensuring the availability, convenience and speed of delivery of goods that require the fully developed, own all-Union Internet sites.

"We have radically different trends in the domestic and cross-border e-commerce market. Our e-commerce with third countries fell from its peak up to four times, and as for the domestic one, it grew to 70% during the pandemic period, and this growth continues," Andrey Slepnev noted, "What conclusion should we make? E-commerce with third countries is a good thing in good weather and fair winds. When the weather turns bad, it becomes evident if we can rely on it as an infrastructure to meet consumer demand."

In this regard, the Eurasian Economic Union is creating a single e-commerce market with all its basic components. First of all, this concerns free activity, free movement of goods, free establishment of companies, pick-up and delivery points, etc. In general, the market must work in a way that seamlessly provides fair conditions in that complex modality when the site can be located in one country, the seller in another, and the buyer in a third.

For this purpose, the general "rules of the game" in the market should be approximated or unified in terms of the requirements for participants in the single electronic commerce market. In this relation, the technological efficiency of regulation becomes a significant issue: electronic commerce should be paperless and governed by unified rules for personal and big data circulation.

"Today, e-commerce accounts for about 11% of all retail in the Union. In fact, e-commerce is beginning to determine the situation in the market, when the emerging barriers become an actual challenge for the free movement of goods. We are talking about data security issues, double taxation, various approaches to consumer protection and other issues," the EEC Minister in charge of Trade explained.

He also called for thinking about how to support exporters who supply goods both to the Union's markets and to third countries. Since small and medium-sized enterprises are doing important work in the current situation to provide citizens with goods, according to Andrey Slepnev, it is just necessary. It is necessary to offer deductions or subsidies, following the example of other states.

 "Finally, I would like to note the issue of systemically important companies. Certainly, we are seriously concerned with the possibility of having repeated risks when the destabilization or instable operation of basic companies could threaten consumers and producers of the entire Union," the Minister concluded.

The session was also attended by Georgy Alikoshvili, Deputy General Director for Commercial Activities of JSC Russian Post, Dmitry Volvach, Deputy Minister of Economic Development of the Russian Federation, Alexei Sazanov, State Secretary - Deputy Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation, Artem Sokolov, President of the Association of Internet Trade Companies. The session was moderated by Oleg Poletaev, Digital Business Development Director of the Interfax Group.