What you should know about Polish marketplace Allegro

In some countries in Europe, you will use eBay or Amazon if you want to trade your goods via an online marketplace. In Poland, you might get fewer customers than you would expect if you use these American websites. That’s because Allegro is the leading marketplace in Poland. Did you know you must have a Polish website if you want to trade via Allegro?

Marcin Jędrzejak wrote an interesting piece about Allegro for the German ecommerce website Shopbetreiber-Blog. He points out that unlike in many Western European countries, international platforms such as eBay or Amazon don’t hold a significant position in Poland. The largest online marketplace in this country is Allegro, which has over 14 million customers of which 90 percent regularly shop on Allegro.pl.

The most popular marketplace in Poland

Just to show how big and popular Allegro is in Poland, 75 percent of survey respondents who were being asked about an online store named Allegro first. The prompted awareness of the Allegro brand is as much as 98 percent in Poland, and for 81 percent of local Internet users, Allegro is the first choice for online shopping.

Allegro is part of Allegro Group, a major ecommerce company which also owns online payment system PayU, price comparison website Ceneo and other popular services such as OtoMoto and Bankier.

Why eBay and Amazon don’t dominate in Poland

As Shopbetreiber-Blog puts it, eBay plays a very minor role in the Polish ecommerce and Amazon isn’t even active there. Amazon does have three large and ultra-modern logistics center in Wroclaw, but the failure of eBay in Poland combined with the huge market dominance by Allegro may have led to Amazon deciding to still not enter the Polish online market. “eBay, which entered the Polish market in 2005, is often called as a concrete example of how well-known, large and global brands can lose to local, strong competitors”, the ecommerce blog writes.

The dominant position and popularity from Allegro in Poland are the result of the early market launch in 1999. Since then, it continued to expand its business and eventually became the undisputed market leader in Poland. Since 2006, the ecommerce company expanded its business to other countries: Aukro.cz in the Czech Republic, TeszVesh.hu in Hungary, Molotok.ru in Russia and Aukro.ua in Ukraine.

Polish-written website needed

As Shopbetreiber-Blog puts it, as a foreign online retailer you can’t gain access to the Polish online market through international platforms such as eBay or Amazon. “This should – if you want to start the internationalization through a platform – be done through Allegro.pl, but keep in mind that it requires a Polish-language website if you want to do business via Allegro.”