Want to purchase goods but hate the idea of leaving your home to do it?

Modern e-commerce nowadays is likely the greatest invention for traders, entrepreneurs and eager buyers. In reality, nothing compares to the commodity in online shopping - you can buy, sell, trade, and exchange goods - all in just one click.

Speaking of quality online shopping, Ilya Shirokov is the man to look at and so is his genius of social networks platforms - Joom!

Welcoming a new era of shopping, Joom is all about breaking performance records and forever changing the game of mobile e-commerce, all through introducing a finer and refined platform beloved by worldwide individual users, companies and then some.

A five-year journey packed with ups, downs, and everything in between, Illya’s story in bringing Joom to the business market is certainly an awe-worthy one!

Read more about Illya’s incredible business escapade here:

A Genius is Born

Ilya Shirokov was born in the early 80s in Moscow. As one of the original tech users of his time, Illya showed a remarkable talent for both computing and mathematics. So, in 1988, Ilya began school at State Budget Educational Institution No.1252.

While studying at a general educational institution, Illya expelled the most in sciences and technologies.

Nine grades later, the young Russian went on to study physics and mathematics at the boarding school N.18, a branch within the Moscow State University, specialized in educational and scientific studies.

Illya continued his education at the Moscow State University until 2003, ultimately acquiring a specialized diploma from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics. Along with these, he also enrolled at the Faculty of Finance, part of the Russian School of Economics, obtaining a master’s degree in 2004.

Ilya’s professional career kicked off by the end of his second year at school, when he became a project manager at the Research Institute for System Research.

In the five years of working at the facility, Illya achieved plenty, developing an arithmetic special processor for one of Russia’s known supercomputers and designing a DSP extension for a universal 64-bit processor.

Once saturated with what he had contributed and learned, Illya quit his job in 2005.

Parallel to his last years at NES, he also trained at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Here, he developed a business process management methodology intended for a 4-member-team and larger companies which he viewed as a personal project.

The Road to an Idea

Illya’s first serious individual project, ‘My Circle’, was in full swing by 2005.

By December, the project was launched, with Illya as its head of operations. Illya managed the project until 2007, before selling it to Yandex.

That same year, Ilya travelled to the USA, where he entered Stanford University, ultimately graduating in 2009 as Master of Business Administration. Following his graduation, Illya boarded a plane home and remained in Moscow to work on his vision.

In the fall of 2009, Ilya was hired by Digital Sky Technologies, now Mail.Ru Group.

Among other ventures, Ilya took a deeper interest in social media networks and influenced their development as part of his job, ultimately leading project after successful project and then realizing - the time to design his own venture had come.

Regardless of his success, Ilya was less than impressed with what he had achieved. As the same old, same old tactics showed fruitless and aimless, he now turned to making the world a bit better and contemplating new projects to keep him engaged.

Initially, Illya developed a tool for storing and sharing photos but quickly realized that his idea was less than convenient, considering both the market’s growing needs at the time and more importantly, Google’s super-competitive arrival on the market.

With no time to consider a greater and more efficient project, Illya gathered a small team to brainstorm short-span ideas and ensure their longevity on the market.

When one of his former colleagues drew attention to online trading, the team looked into the existing trends, and the more they looked - the more they loved the idea of it.

World, say hello to Joom!

Brick by Brick

Ilya and his team decided to experiment and made three identical applications using a variety of goods.

The data collected indicated that there was a lot of interest in Chinese products, so the team adopted this market into their Joom concept.

Ilya fancied the mobile e-commerce scheme for several reasons. As society became more and more dependent on using smartphones, so were sales, now operating mobile-only in 90% of the cases. Being a master of interfaces, Illya took lots of inspiration in the way similar platforms to Joom worked, like Chinese AliExpress which largely dominated the Russian market.

Among other factors, Illya also understood modern technologies, such as machine learning and computer vision, and their crucial role in virtual modern-day business.

With Joom, Ilya not only created one of the largest Internet companies in Russia but also took the platform internationally and made it the recognizable mobile commerce giant it is today.

Choosing Chinese products, Joom competitively levelled up with AliExpress.

While everyone else deemed it impossible to beat a market mogul with 99% of market presence, Joom rose to the occasion and provided both convenient service and the option to solve problems locally - thus triumphing in its mission to please!

By its second birthday, the application witnessed 100 million downloads.

Buying on your phone never looked so good!

Joom: A New Era of Shopping

While running his social networking business back at Mail.ru Group, Illya saved enough funds to boost Joom’s progress and longevity on the market.

As a polished e-commerce marketplace, Joom’s mobile shopping app sells Chinese products at cut-rate prices and directly to buyers. The company has also recruited and targeted various French brands in an effort to bolster its merchant roster on the market and take its services to Europe and USA’s Amazon.

Currently, Joom offers 10+ million Chinese-made products to global customers.

The platform offers over 10,000 French products as well and sees the home of haute-couture fashion as a testing ground for scaling up sales of products made outside China.

Joom’s main rivals include US-based Wish and AliExpress, owned by China’s Alibaba, and continues working with low prices from Chinese and non-Chinese origin, delivered timely, accurately and directly to the online shoppers’ doorsteps.

Since mid-2017, Joom has been mostly present on the French market, where it became both the country’s and Europe’s leading e-commerce platform.

The European market makes up 50% of Joom’s global GMV while holding 45% on the Russian market.

Joom, Today

With over 250,000,000 users on iOS, Android, and Web, in 2018, Joom became one of the top-five apps on both AppStore and Google Play.

With a revenue of more than €1.7 million and company size counting from 50 to 100 employees, Joom’s headquarters remain settled in both Riga and Moscow, while holding offices in San Francisco, Shenzhen, and a logistics hub in Hong Kong.

The platform has been active in various European countries like France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, etc, with future plans to launch across other continents as well.

Offering the most convenient mobile marketplace and enhancing everything from seller-buyer communication, product personalization and discounts, as well as high-quality special offers, Joom is here to play and more than that - it’s here to stay!