VLADIVOSTOK, September 4. /TASS/. Russian Export Center (REC) and China’s Epinduo have signed an agreement to launch a specialized national online store to sell food products from Russia, TASS correspondent reports from the signing ceremony held at the Eastern Economic Forum on Wedensday.

The store will be launched on Tmall Food & Fresh, the food segment of one of China’s biggest b2c-platforms Tmall.com (part of Alibaba Group).

It is planned to turn the flagship store into a platform for producers to sell goods avoiding the difficult and long process of opening their own stores. Currently Alibaba Group is launching stores to sell goods from New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore as part of a global import strategy.

"REC and Epindou will jointly develop the store’s marketing strategy, the criteria for participation, select companies to place their products on the virtual shelf. It is planned to launch the store and place the products of at least ten Russian producers in it by the end of the year," REC’s Senior Vice President Alexey Kozhevnikov said.

The online store will be launched next week, Kozhevnikov noted, adding that he expects sales worth at least 500 mln rubles ($7.4 mln). "Honestly, I expect more as half a billion is quite a modest amount. We all know how positively Chinese consumers deal with Russian goods as they consider those products of high quality and ecologically clean," he explained.

The store will mainly offer products of Far Eastern companies, Senior Vice President said.

"The competition for the solvent Chinese consumer is on the rise. Our target is to promote 500 companies through that store in three years," he said.