The
author left the Boston Consulting Group to join Ozon in part because she had
once been an entrepreneur and missed the excitement--but mostly because she saw
the company’s potential to become the Amazon of Russia. Russians were going
online at an extraordinary rate; if Ozon could figure out how to deliver goods
in an e-commerce market, despite the country’s shaky distribution systems, its
growth would skyrocket. The company’s success in e-commerce would hinge on
logistics and customer support. Ozon had to persuade people that they could get
their goods more quickly and reliably by ordering them online and having them
delivered than by hoping to find them in stock at a shop. It needed a way to
safely take and process the cash that Russians usually pay with. And it had to
provide personal contact with customers and harvest data about their purchases
and preferences. This is the story of how Gavet and her team met those
challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]