The situation on Ozon: more sellers every month
Competition on Ozon is no longer just a fight for the best spot in search results, for traffic and attention. It is a fight for survival. The market rewards sellers who take strong positions in their category quickly: everything after that gets easier.
According to Ozon's own reporting, the platform has passed 600,000 sellers, and hundreds or thousands more join every month. The inflow was much higher in 2021-2022, but new sellers keep arriving today, and that creates competition.
By our observations, and by measurements from other experts and from Ozon itself, very few sellers actually establish themselves. More than 80 percent do not survive: 8 out of 10 sellers who join burn out within the first two to three months. Some hold on a little longer, some a little less, but on average after 2-3 months 8 out of 10 sellers leave the platform or sharply cut their sales volume.
Why sellers leave
The reason is often not Ozon itself. Commissions are rising, logistics is getting more expensive, advertising is getting more complex and costly, and there are taxes on top. You can always find reasons. But objectively: we also sell on Ozon and face the same commissions, yet we adapt and make a profit.
The real cause behind 8 out of 10 sellers failing is not so much Ozon as an oversupply of look-alike products and the race to the bottom on price. Trying to gain a foothold, sellers often underprice at launch, thinking "I will set a low price now, build momentum, and then grow properly." Later they discover that raising the price back is very hard: sales drop, and this is exactly the stage where sellers close down or go bankrupt because there are no sales.
From our experience watching a large number of seller stores, turning a profit is now many times harder than it was in 2022-2023. Back then you could just sell somehow and still make some profit. Today, with these commissions and costs, it is far more difficult.
Competition on speed and analytics
So in 2025-2026 competition will not be only about price. Price on Ozon is now just one of several dozen elements that actually affect sales. Competition will be about price and about the speed of decision-making.
What does speed of decision-making mean? The speed of testing: how often and how fast you run tests, how quickly you form hypotheses and how long it takes to validate them, get results and either keep them or move on. The speed of testing hypotheses is a competitive advantage today.
How deeply you have learned to analyze the numbers and market changes matters just as much. Those who adapt quickly to these changes and validate hypotheses fast end up taking the market. That is exactly what is happening. Sellers who use the available tools for their tasks to move faster and work more efficiently gain an edge.
Dumping: smart and not so smart
The first form of competition is dumping. The classic story: almost every seller runs into dumping in their category at some point. But on Ozon dumping has become fairly smart.
There is blunt dumping, where prices are simply pushed down to purchase cost, and you try to compete with that.
But looking at overall market trends, the picture is changing. We have a large portfolio of partner projects and stores across industries and track many categories. Dumping on Ozon is becoming smarter.
What is smart dumping? Ozon itself suggests the price it wants through its price index. Many sellers follow it blindly: Ozon says what price to set, so that is the price. Without accounting for their own unit economics, profitability, or profit targets. They think: I bought cheaper, so I will be in profit. In reality, as you can imagine, it works out differently.
The result: margin falls, turnover grows, possibly thanks to promotions and a favorable price, but profit is either zero or negative.
Newcomers who follow this smart dumping, the price index and its recommendations often think: "I sell a lot, I earn well, my sales are great." But they do not see the real numbers and do not realize the situation is completely different.
More experienced sellers, by contrast, usually hold their price and pay less attention to the price index. Instead they work on raising CTR and improving card conversion. They work not at the price level but at the level of the sales funnel, improving their funnel.
Unfair competitor tactics
The most obvious ones are mass buyouts, fake returns and fake negative reviews. All of this came over from Wildberries and at some point became active on Ozon. But there is a difference, again from our observations: we work with both platforms and see the distinctions.
For all its drawbacks, the things we criticize it for, Ozon protects sellers somewhat better here. Why? Because some reviews go through manual moderation. If night moderation flags problems or manipulation, a large number of reviews can be removed during a deeper check. It happens rarely, but it happens. On Wildberries this does not happen, at least in our practice we have never seen it.
Protection is still not perfect, and the human factor always exists. If you do not track your metrics and reputation, unfair tactics from competitors can knock you out of the top in a week or two. So watch your metrics, reputation and indicators very closely: they matter a lot.
Our advice: set up review monitoring and buyout monitoring, either an AI-based service or at least a shared spreadsheet where you export the data. You need it to spot anomalies and see what changes are happening to your product cards. Overall, do not get drawn into a review war.
Cover negative reviews with positive ones, the way sellers usually do on Wildberries. But do it calmly and systematically: do not wait for bad reviews to hit and then order a burst of hundreds or thousands of buyouts. Better to cover the negative with a small number of buyouts, but regularly and consistently.
The future: competing with AI
Looking at the trends, I see a shift: the new competition is not with other sellers or stores, but rather with AI-based services. Competition is gradually moving to the analytics level: AI-powered analytics versus manual analytics. Those who calculate numbers by hand, brainstorm hypotheses by hand, test by hand and analyze metrics by hand are already losing to sellers who use automation and AI services.
For the long term, you need to prepare to move onto these services if you want to stay competitive, grow and earn well on marketplaces. Sellers who already use tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT or similar see the market much faster and understand better what is happening with the market and how metrics are changing for their store, each product, advertising and organic traffic. Those who work with AI or with tools that speed up their work will grow much faster.
A classic seller who still calculates numbers by hand, draws conclusions and forms hypotheses spends 3-5 days on it. With services, the same work takes literally 3-5 minutes. Compare: 3-5 days versus 3-5 minutes at the same quality of result, sometimes even better.
So competing today means being able to work with these tools and with automation. Previously you could compete on price, on whose infographics were prettier, who had more keywords, who had more reviews. Now competition is getting more complex and gradually moving to the level of working with large amounts of data and automation services.
What to do to grow
What do you actually need to do to develop and grow your store? Forget the approach "I will join, get lucky and earn well." It is no longer a game of chance.
Marketplace and business on Ozon, or on any marketplace, now face such high competition that you should not count on luck. Count only on cold calculation, on numbers, on working with metrics. Only numbers let you grow and develop.
What else: automate the collection of data on stock, reports, advertising and organic metrics. All of it should live in one system where you have the full picture of the business, where you can form hypotheses, implement them and track their impact on sales. At the same time, think not about discounts and how to lower the price, but about positioning: how you present the product, what makes it different, what makes it better, whether you communicate its advantages.
Positioning delivers a much stronger result than working with price. You can always lower the price, that is the dumbest method. Working on positioning, you build the right associations and conclusions in the buyer's mind, after which they buy your product even if it is more expensive.
Learn to sell not the product and its features, but the meaning of the purchase: the emotion, the value, the lifestyle that comes with your product. Also build an ecosystem around the product card: content, reviews, brand. Develop not only sales inside the marketplace but also the sales ecosystem outside it: your own channels where you handle customer support and can do upsells.
Watch your speed of decision-making and your funnel: what the numbers are at each stage. This is the new currency on Ozon, and sellers who learn to work with it will grow much faster and more efficiently. And most importantly, think like entrepreneurs, not like traders following the "bought this much, resold it" scheme.
A seller's mindset is short-term: a week, a month at most. An entrepreneur's mindset comes from a strategy for six months or a year. Of course, everything changes: prices, commissions, advertising. But you can adapt to it if you have a strategy you follow clearly.
Competition as a filter for the strong
I now see competition on Ozon as a filter that removes weak sellers from the platform. Those who dump bluntly and do not understand how to sell at the right prices and earn from it. This competition, all these changes and the shakeout of businesses on the platform, is a filter that genuinely reduces the number of sellers, and the number of foolish sellers, on Ozon.
And it clears the way for those who approach the platform with intelligence and analytical rigor. For me this growth and these changes are not only a minus but also a big plus. In 2026 the sellers who remain will be those who work with analytics, with AI and with strategy.
Those who rely on luck, who work on the "8 out of 10" pattern, usually fly off the platform very quickly. So if you want not just to survive but to grow, start acting systematically now. Start working with numbers, analytics and AI.
Immerse yourself in these numbers gradually. You really should have done it long ago, but better late than never.
Summary
Competition on Ozon filters out the weak and gives an advantage to those who work with numbers, analytics and automation. To grow, act systematically and think like an entrepreneur.
