Poland

Android Pay, which enables contactless mobile payments with Android devices, has launched in Poland. This is the first country in Central and Eastern Europe and the second country in Europe, after the UK, to roll out the payments service.

French private-sale group Vente-Privée has again acquired a fashion player in Europe. Yesterday it announced it attained a majority stake in Złote Wyprzedaże, the biggest online shopping club in Poland. With the acquisition, Vente-Privée expands its activities in Eastern Europe.

Carrefour has over 800 hypermarkets, supermarkets and local stores in Poland and launched an online store in Poland last year. But this ecommerce website only offers non-food products. If we have to believe the rumors, that's about to change. Carrefour is said to sell groceries online in Poland.

The global internet group Naspers Limited has sold 100 percent of its stakes in Allegro Group, which includes online marketplace Allegro.pl and price comparison website Ceneo.pl, to private equity firms Cinven, Permira and Mid Europa. Naspers sold the Poland-based ecommerce group for 3.253 billion dollar (€2.96 billion).

One in four Polish online consumers is planning to increase their expenditures on online shopping. They are also spending more on clothing and accessories and less on mobile devices than they did a year ago. Also, men spend more on electronics, while women spend more on books, CDs and films.

Picodi, a Polish website offering customers coupons from hundreds of retailers, has grown to become an internationally operating company. But while it was active in many countries, it also used a similar number of different names. It now operates in 32 countries worldwide under one name: Picodi.

Two Polish online payment systems, Dotpay and eCard, will join forces and expand in Central and Eastern Europe. The two companies are part of MCI.EuroVentures' fund portfolio and are specialized in online electronic payments. The company established as a result of their integration wants to become the market leader in Poland.

Allegro has opened its doors in Germany. The Polish ecommerce leader made a quite entrance in its neighboring country. The ecommerce service should help Polish sellers with marketing their products in Germany, Europe's third largest ecommerce country.

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?

Visa will make its online payment service Visa Checkout available to merchants and consumers in the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Poland and Spain this year. With Visa Checkout, users have the security and convenience of the Visa card, but then in the digital world.

Alma24.pl, a major online grocery retailer in Poland, now enables its customers to collect their shopping in special cooling terminals, which are located within the premises of Statoil fuel stations. Alma24.pl can offer this thanks to a partnership with Coolomat, a Polish manufacturer of cooling devices for online shopping.

Are their differences between shoppers in let's say France or Spain? Yes, of course. The major steps of the customer journey may look similar across all countries, there are certainly a few differences in each country. DPD studied the behavior and expectations of 18-25 year olds in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Poland.

Lesara, a Berlin-based online fashion and lifestyle retailer, has announced it will now also supply customers in the United Kingdom, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Bulgaria, The Republic of Ireland, Romania, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

For ecommerce players, having an omni-channel approach is getting more and more important as customers continue to demand ever-higher levels of service. This requires retailers to adapt new models and be everywhere the customer wants them to be. Specific approaches to omni-channel however, differ widely from country to country.

About one in four internet users in Poland who already shop online plans to increase the amount of money they spend online. On the other hand, just four percent say they are planning to reduce their online spending in the future.