The clause on exemption from liability in military operations appeared in the offers of both sites quietly, without public announcements, and remained unnoticed until it became practically applicable. The drone attack on Wildberries warehouse complexes in the Moscow and Tambov regions translated the abstract legal formulation into the plane of real losses of specific sellers.
The head of Wildberries, Tatiana Kim, confirmed the company's position directly: the site is not obligated to compensate sellers for goods lost as a result of such events. The wording in the offer covers a wide range of circumstances — combat, military, defensive actions, attacks by unmanned vehicles — and transfers the associated risk of loss of goods from the site to the seller himself.
The logic of the sites is clear from the point of view of managing their own risks: insurance of inventory balances in warehouses against military risks is an expensive and difficult to predict item that marketplaces have chosen not to take on in the current conditions. But for the seller, this means a fundamental change in the situation: the goods that are physically located in the warehouse of the site and beyond the seller's control, in case of loss from such events, remain completely his financial loss.
Until now, many sellers have proceeded from the tacit assumption that the goods in the marketplace warehouse are insured by the marketplace itself or that the responsibility for their safety in any case lies with the warehouse operator. The new offers directly refute this assumption for a specific category of risks.
A practical step for sellers is to review the insurance of inventory balances placed in marketplace warehouses. A standard product insurance policy often excludes military risks by default, so you need to check with the insurer separately whether the loss from UAV attacks and combat operations is covered, and if necessary, extend the coverage. For goods stored in warehouses in border and central regions that fall into the risk zone, this issue has ceased to be theoretical.
