The growing Polish ecommerce market

What does the future of ecommerce look like in Poland? This week, I was honored to be invited onto a panel discussing ‘Riding the Wave of Ecommerce into the Future’ as part of the Ecommerce Trends Summit.

Organized by MIT Sloan Management Institute Polska and the ICAN Institute, the summit offered a timely forum about ecommerce for a country rapidly undergoing digital transformation.

As with all countries, Poland has seen a massive shift online post-Covid, and predominantly offline companies are scrambling to catch up with online-first retailers. These laggards were behind on use of modern ecommerce platforms like Shopify, but are now catching up fast as they understand the true cost of maintaining an excellent web channel.

Since Shopify launched local language versions of their store admin in 2019 it has been a more popular choice for Europe-based companies, and Shopify is now heavily marketing in France, Germany and other countries. Many brands are extending across these markets, and at Littledata we’ve built multi-currency tracking into our main SaaS product for Shopify merchants. In the Shopify world, each country site is a separate-but-connected “country store” for localized shopping and payments.

I’d expect more Polish companies to migrate to Shopify or other cloud solutions (WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc) in the near future. The larger brands will likely choose Shopify Plus.

The other themes of the panel were more general to retailers globally: stores need smarter marketing, better personalization and a more unique sales proposition as competition heats up.

In addition, Amazon.de (Amazon Germany) is just as big a threat to individual brands as elsewhere, but that makes it just as important for stores to own their own customer channel and direct brand experience. And that means running their own online store.

Let’s hope Littledata gets to do more business with Polish ecommerce sites soon!