45% growth in Polish cross-border ecommerce in 2014

There was a growth of 45% in the cross-border ecommerce industry in Poland this year. With this growth rate, it grew harder than the cross-border ecommerce industry in European countries like Romania, Greece and Hungary. Polish consumers would shop more abroad if cost of returns was free.

Ecommerce in Poland worth €5.6bn in 2014
This is apparent from a presentation Ganna Yevtushenko, Head of Business Development at PayPal, held during Meet Magento Poland last month. That’s where she also told the Polish ecommerce industry was worth 7 billion dollars (€5.64bn) in 2014. For comparison: the value of the ecommerce industry in 2014 was estimated at €6.94bn by Money.pl and Interaktywnie.com last month.

During the presentation, Yevtushenko told the audience the global cross-border ecommerce industry is worth 105 billion dollars in 2014, while this will grow to 307 billion dollars by 2018. So, there’s still a lot of growth potential for the Polish market.

However, the Polish cross-border ecommerce industry already grew by 45% this year (based on PayPal’s own data), which makes it a faster growing cross-border country than Romania (+36%), Greece (+30%) and Hungary (+21%). The Czech Republic however, grew by 48%.

Free returns to drive cross-border ecommerce
The PayPal woman also made clear that 83% of Polish buyers would shop more online if cost of returns was free. And according to data from another presentation she held in October, 58% to 357% is the potential growth in sales of online stores that start offering free returns. This is a very high number, but it has to do with the fact online stores can attract much more customers from abroad whenever they start offering this free returns option.