Yandex.Money and CS-Cart to Help Create Online Stores for Free

August 11, 2014

Yandex.Money and Simtech have launched Merchium, a cloud solution based on the CS-Cart content management system. Using this solution any person can create an online store: no special skills are needed. The site can be launched as a new website or integrated into an already existing one. Plus, users can open stores on social networks by adding the app with all the necessary options—catalog of goods, shopping cart, customer account—to a specific page (e.g. Facebook or VKontakte). Creating and hosting a resource on Merchium is free.

Yandex.Money’s universal payment solution is already integrated with Merchium. The solution allows stores to accept payments using the most popular methods in Russia and the CIS: Yandex.Money Wallet and WebMoney Purse, Visa/VisaElectron, MasterCard, and Maestro bank cards, mobile phone balances, and cash via over 170 thousand payment kiosk and retail locations all over Russia.

The platform is also integrated with other Yandex services. For example, users can upload the store’s catalog of goods to Yandex.Market and mark customer pick-up points on Yandex.Maps.

“Merchium is a universal platform. It is a good fit for both experienced e-commerce players as well as newcomers,” says Roman Ananyev, Yandex.Money’s e-commerce platform specialist. “Later we are planning to add new payment methods to Merchium and integrate it with more Yandex services.”

“Merchium is based on the CS-Cart system, which in turn is the basis for over 35 thousand online stores worldwide,” says Vladimir Kalynyak, general director of Simtech. “The platform offers all of CS-Cart’s functionality but is based on cloud technologies. The platform is now Russian-oriented, but in the future we are planning to bring it to European and US markets where CS-Cart is already widely known. We expect about 10 thousand Merchium-based online stores to be created in the next two years.”