The Price Didn't Change, but the Margin Vanished: What Yandex Market Did on September 1

A product has been sitting in its listing at the same price for three months, and yet the margin is a different one now. Checking whether "did someone change the price" doesn't help here: what matters is the rate applied to your own price.

What happened on September 1, 2026

On August 20–21, 2026, five industry outlets — rb.ru, Retail.ru, CNews.ru, T-Business, and New Retail — reported that Yandex Market had aligned the tariffs for sellers working under different sales models: those selling from the platform's warehouse and those selling from their own warehouse. The new terms took effect on September 1, 2026 and are already in force as of publication. The base FBY and FBS rates, which used to differ, are now identical. Which way your margin moves from here depends on where your rate stood before the alignment: for some items the margin will grow, for others it will shrink.

Why one price yields different margins

The commission and part of the logistics costs are calculated as a percentage of the price, while storage, handling, and packaging are charged in rubles per unit. The percentage moves with the price, while the fixed costs stay put even when the price drops. So every item has a number worth calculating regularly: the effective channel cost rate as a share of the price. That's the slice the channel takes out of every ruble of your price. The price in the listing didn't change, but that slice grew — which means the margin fell.

A simple example. The price is ₽2,400, the rate was 32% — ₽768 per sale. Now it's 35% — ₽840. The price in the listing is the same, but you're paying the channel ₽72 more per unit; at a thousand sales, that's ₽72,000 a month. Run your own numbers against your own price list: the arithmetic always works. A rate change at an unchanged price eats into margin quietly, with no notification in your report.

The August backdrop

On August 26, 2026, several outlets reported that Ozon and Wildberries had sharply raised seller commissions over the year, and on that very same day articles came out saying that marketplace commissions exceed 40% of the product cost for sellers and that almost half of sellers' revenue goes to commissions. On September 25, 2026, rb.ru wrote that marketplaces retain more than 40% of sellers' revenue over a year and a half. The sample, period, and methodology behind these publications aren't disclosed: as a gauge of pressure on your costs, they do; as a ready-made number for a financial model, they don't. And the day before, on August 25, Ozon was reported to have even lowered its per-sale tariff by 3 percentage points. The rate moves in both directions, and you can't predict it from the news.

The order of recalculation

1. Open today's tariff in your seller dashboard — not the date from the article, not a colleague's secondhand retelling.
2. Calculate the effective cost rate as a share of the price for each item: commission, logistics, storage, returns. Separately by scheme if you sell both from your own warehouse and from the platform's warehouse.
3. Fix first the items where the rate rose the most and the SKUs that went negative after the recalculation. That's a reason to renegotiate the terms with your supplier or to pull the item, not a reason to cut prices.
4. Decide for each product which storefront it should live on. The decision is made on the recalculated formula, not on a gut feeling.

Where the price should live

On September 21, 2026, Sostav.ru wrote that a single channel is no longer a pillar of the business and that companies are diversifying their sales. The article gives no specific shares for owned storefronts, so the question "leave the marketplace or stay" is a matter of calculation, not opinion. You need to calculate it based on your own cost rate and on how quickly the marketplace's traffic turns into sales. For example, at a 15% margin, losing ten percent of sales means minus 1.5% of revenue in profit — which is comparable to the channel's costs rising by a percentage point and a half. The figures are of the same order of magnitude, which is exactly why you need to calculate them together.

What to track first

More often than a competitor's price, look at the effective cost rate as a share of the price — separately for each fulfillment scheme. It explains your margin better than someone else's price in a neighboring listing, and it changes for entirely verifiable reasons: a platform tariff update, a change in the category rules, a product moving between schemes. A rate can change within a single marketplace — that's exactly what happened at Yandex Market on September 1, 2026.

So the pricing formula should live in the rules, not in a manager's head: describe it once, apply it to the entire assortment, and recalculate it whenever the platform changes its terms. Pricerio closes this loop: automated pricing by formulas that account for the commission and channel costs, monitoring of competitor and supplier prices, a history of changes, margin analytics.

What to do today

Open the tariff in your seller dashboard for the three items with the highest turnover, recalculate the cost rate as a share of the price, and see how many SKUs went negative. Usually the answer turns up within the first twenty minutes.

And did your rate differ by scheme before September 1? Tell us in the comments how the alignment affected your margin: whose went up, whose went down.