The global spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus infection has led to significant changes in the Russian retail trade. This pandemic has forced millions of people to stay at home, avoid public places and, of course, buy less. To adapt to the new features of consumer behaviour, retailers need to promptly respond, adapt, or dramatically change their business processes and strategies. The transfer of business to the online environment has ceased to be just a promising direction - now it is the only condition for survival and further business development.

Experts concur with the opinion that the penetration of online sales services will continue to grow and those companies, that are minimally present in the online environment, or have not entered it at all, will be in a very unstable position.

At the same time, the transfer of business into the format of online trading requires solving many practical issues, necessitating the analysis of numerous legal points, e.g. what contracts should be concluded when launching your own online trading platform, or in cooperation with existing online platforms, how to properly use the existing physical stores and to manage human resources, as well as what aspects should be taken into consideration in the context of intellectual property and data protection. Negative effects of any unforeseen event can be minimized, if you have a clear plan of action that addresses the need to solve the arising legal issues.

For this purpose, the experts of ALRUD Law Firm have compiled a checklist of necessary actions that will help the heads of legal departments and representatives of retail chains to establish, within a short time, a swift transition to the online environment, from the perspective of legal regulation.

We hope that our checklist will be useful and help you address all possible legal risks when transferring your business to the online environment.

Download

We also recommend that you refer to the ALRUD’spractical guidance “Minimizing Legal Risks underCOVID-19”, which combines the key practicalissues that business often face today, and ourrecommendations on building workflows.

In addition, on our regularly-updated website,we have created a dedicated section to help youstay up-to-date with the latest changesrelated to coronavirus spread – COVID-19: What you need to know.