DriveRight Takes Its Tyre E-Commerce Data to Russia

DriveRight has introduced its product offering into Russia by appointing Bazakoles as DriveRight’s Russian-based agent. With DriveRight predicting Russia will become one of Europe’s largest internet markets, possibly even second behind Germany, and an emerging passenger car market to back up tyres, the company is confident the move will bring a “significant advantage” to the company.

DriveRight director Duncan Hadley explained: “The partnership with Bazakoles has been seamless in terms of providing a product to a new region that they can take to market very quickly. Unlike other products sold into non-English speaking countries, DriveRight’s database has been easily deployed without the complication of language barriers or translation services. For example, an Audi A3 is known as an Audi A3 in any country, and a tyre size of 195/60/R15 is the same, even in Russia. Our data is language neutral."

 “We have a distributor in the US on-selling our data to several thousand distributors and retailers, and despite the language difference, the roll-out with Bazakoles was basically the same. We have deployed our product throughout countries such as France and Italy, yet the investment in telecommunications infrastructure has been far more advanced than Russia, which by comparison is only starting to come on stream. We have secured a distributor who saw the value in investing in the two industries (tyres and e-commerce) early and therefore had the infrastructure to meet our criteria”.

Bazakoles distributes data to the wheel and tyre industry in Russia from a web-based sales office with a similar interface to DriveRight’s own wheelwizards.net website.

 “The opportunity we are helping to facilitate for tyre and wheel distributors in Russia will also have flow-on benefits for exporters around the world wanting to also take advantage of the emerging market. Basically we are able to supply both ends of the spectrum with the advantage of access to accurate fitment data with our Tyrefit online database. It’s apples for apples if both parties have the same data,” Duncan clarified.

DriveRight have already reported increasing sales of data within Russia, and predict a firm increase to the 5.5 million monthly queries they are currently experiencing around the globe. “We claim DriveRight products are considered to be the aftermarket industry standard. This will allow Russian businesses to keep pace with the predicted development of the automotive industry.”