Online fashion trends in Poland

The online fashion industry in Poland is being dominated by two players. First, there’s online sales platform Allegro that, via the so-called Strefa Marek, offers products from various popular fashion brands. And of course, there’s Zalando which dominates the online fashion retail industry with its ecommerce business. Gemius shared the latest trends from this industry with us.

Mateusz Gordon is one of the ecommerce experts from business consulting company Gemius. He says there’s a growing trend among popular fashion brands to start their own online stores or cooperate with Strefa Marek, offered through Allegro.

Allegro is now a popular fashion platform
Allegro once started as an online sales platform, but now it has a 40 percent share of the fashion market in the B2C sector in Poland. And although many consumers might still associate Allegro with an auction site were used items are sold, now more than 85 percent of the goods sold in the fashion category of this platform are actually brand  new.

Gordon goes on about how more and more fashion brands now consider Allegro a valuable sales channel. “It’s worth mentioning that Allegro has been developing the functionalities and features that are required to manage the sales of fashion products, such as a mobile channel and free-of-charge returns (with the Allegro Paczkomaty Inpost service).” The product category ‘fashion’ is currently visited by one third of Allegro’s users.

Gordon thinks the rapid development of the online clothing business in Poland may have had something to do with the entry of foreign companies. And when you speak about foreign fashion companies, you have to mention Zalando. The German fashion giant now holds a lead position among online shops which offer fashion products.

Single-brand fashion services in Poland
When we’re looking only at online single-brand fashion services, the Polish player LPP is the biggest. Almost 4 percent of Internet users visit this service every month. “Global brands as Zara or Timberland for example can’t reach the level of 2 percent of their outreach”, the ecommerce experts says. For multi-brand stores it’s easier to build their outreach, he says. But these companies have to compete with one another over the best customer service, while generating considerable logistics costs.

Gordon has also something to share when it’s about upcoming trends in online fashion sales. “A personal sales channel is currently a must-have in the fashion category. We can therefore expect the launch of new shops representing well-known offline brands. Based on the structure of Polish ecommerce and its clear division between Allegro and the others, we can assume that various companies will soon be willing to work with the Allegro sales platform and supply its Strefa Marek with their goods (whether using it as a complementary channel or an alternative to their own services).”