Wildberries Cut Penalties on October 7. The Claim over Pricing Below the RRP Remains

On October 7, 2026, Frank Media and Vedomosti reported that Wildberries had reduced fines for some sellers. Earlier, on October 1, 2026, the platform economy law took effect, and its amendments touched on how sellers operate on marketplaces: returns and fines.

It would be easy to read that news as: risk has gone down, so the question of pricing below the RRP can wait. It shouldn't wait. A reduced fine and a seller check belong to the marketplace's domain. A claim over pricing below the RRP lives in a different domain: your counterparty raises it, using the formula in your contract and the data you feed them.

What actually changed

The test for whether this has anything to do with the RRP is a simple one. If the new rules regulated deviations from the recommended retail price, it would show up in the list of topics affected. In the confirmed materials it doesn't: Frank Media's and Vedomosti's October 7 headlines, the lists of changes at GARANT and Interfax, the walkthrough of the amendments for Ozon sellers, the dp.ru overview of returns and fines. The full texts of the primary sources could not be assembled — only headlines and lists are available, and the RRP is nowhere in them. The amendments concern a different layer: fines and returns.

Second: the size of the Wildberries fine reduction, the list of violations affected, and the effective date are all unconfirmed. You cannot build a pricing policy on numbers from these news stories — you'll have to rely on the contract.

Hence the practical takeaway: news about reduced fines is not an argument for your pricing policy. The argument is the contract with your supplier or distributor.

Two different circles of responsibility

A marketplace fine is a figure taken from the platform's rules: the list of violations, the conditions, the effective date. The seller answers for it to the marketplace.

A claim over pricing below the RRP works differently. Your counterparty raises it, calculates it using the formula in the contract, and relies on the seller's data: the actual price, the RRP, the period, the shipped volume. The marketplace is not part of that contractual calculation.

Which gives us an unpleasant but workable distinction. You control the size of a marketplace fine indirectly, by complying with the platform's rules. You control the size of a contractual claim directly — through the actual price deviations across your seller network.

What deviation looks like in practice

Say a distributor agrees on a promotion with you, gets the approval, and puts the price below the RRP for seven days. Sales run, the month-end report closes.

Three weeks later an email arrives: cases of sales below the RRP have been identified for the period from such-and-such date to such-and-such date, the calculation is attached, respond within the period stated in the contract.

Then it turns out you don't have three things at hand: a list of SKUs with the actual price at each seller for that period, the current version of the RRP with its effective date, and confirmation that the promotion was approved. All of it has to be reassembled from scratch, by hand, across seller accounts, retroactively.

What a contractual claim is made of

• Before you argue with the number, look for seven things in the contract:
• 1. The calculation base. What it's computed off: the RRP, the seller's pre-discount price, or actual shipments.
• 2. The period. From what moment, and through which dates, the deviation is measured.
• 3. The volume. Whether they count what was shipped or what was sold — the difference can be substantial.
• 4. The form of recovery. A bonus clawback, a deduction from payment, a fine, or a refusal to approve a discount for the following period.
• 5. The review window and the dispute procedure. How many days you have to respond, and how a dispute gets raised.
• 6. The list of permitted mechanics. Which promotions can be run without approval.
• 7. Who sets the RRP and how it changes. Who notifies you of a new price list, and from what moment it takes effect.
• Seven items — and in practice, the first three are the ones the manufacturer and distributor are routinely short on.

Illustrative example

The numbers below are illustrative: they show the mechanics of the calculation, not your real numbers.

Say the contract states that a deviation below the RRP is measured over the period and charged as a percentage of the shipped value for the days of the violation. The network has 20 sellers, each with 300 SKUs. Four sellers took part in the promotion, three SKUs each. For some of the items, the price sat below the RRP for two days out of the seven.

The claim will cover the shipped value of exactly those items for those days, multiplied by the rate from the contract. Everything outside the sample drops out of the calculation: the other SKUs, the other days, the other sellers.

That's the point of a deviation list. The more precisely it is broken down by SKU, period, and seller, the more concrete the dispute. A reply of "there were no discrepancies" without the export doesn't answer the claim — it just pushes the data collection onto your counterparty. And your counterparty collects it by hand in exactly the same way.

What to do today

• 1. Record the current RRP for every SKU and the date it took effect. Not in someone's head and not in a chat thread, but in a file the purchasing team actually uses.
• 2. Build a list of SKUs with actual deviations across all platforms and all sellers in the network. Start with the ones where the deviation held for more than a single day.
• 3. Open the contract and find the pricing policy clauses: the calculation base, the period, the form of recovery, the review window.
• 4. Establish who approves seller promotions and how. If the approval exists only verbally, that's the first place a discrepancy will show up.
• 5. Assign an owner and a reconciliation cadence. Without an owner of the process, a deviation list lives exactly as long as it takes for the supplier's first request to come in.

Why manual reconciliation doesn't scale

Take 300 SKUs, 20 sellers, and three platforms: that's roughly 18,000 observed prices. There aren't enough hours in the day to check them by hand, and between checks the list goes stale. In practice you don't reconcile the network — you reconcile whichever SKUs someone reminded you about.

Which is also why claims arrive in the shape they do: they come when someone requests them, not when something actually happens.

RRP control for manufacturers and distributors in Pricerio is built on the same principle: monitoring compliance with recommended retail prices across the catalog, tracking the price for every SKU, keeping a history of price changes. You see the discrepancy before the letter arrives, not after it.

If the claim has already arrived

• First. Don't argue with the amount — record the period, the list of SKUs, and the date you received the letter. An answer from memory is worse than an answer from a data export.
• Second. Pull the prices by SKU and by seller for the stated period, the current version of the RRP for each SKU, the log of promo approvals for that same period, and the text of the contract clause on recovery.
• Third. Stay within the reconciliation deadline set by the contract. An answer later than the deadline is a separate risk, and no smaller than the dispute over the substance.

Fourth. You can challenge it if the procedure is spelled out in the contract. The dispute rests on two things: whether the shipment went out under the approved promotion, or whether the deviation was in SKUs that weren't included in the calculation.

Sources

Frank Media, 07.10.2026 — Wildberries reduced fines for sellers: by how much and why. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi

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Vedomosti, 07.10.2026 — Wildberries reduced fines for some sellers. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMij

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Interfax, 01.10.2026 — Russia's platform economy law has entered into force. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi

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GARANT — Marketplaces: what will change for buyers, sellers, and platform operators. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi

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OZON Seller — Platform economy law: what will change for Ozon sellers starting October 1, 2026. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMirw

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dp.ru — Product returns and new fines: what will change on marketplaces from October 1. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMic

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What to do right now

Open your price list and the price export from your sellers. Check whether there's a file next to it that lists the RRP for each SKU along with its effective date. If no such file exists, you'll learn about a discrepancy before the supplier does only by accident — from their letter.