Polish e-commerce in H1 2026: the changes that actually moved

The first half of 2026 brought several changes to Polish e-commerce that aren’t widely discussed yet, even though they genuinely affect how selling online works. None of them makes much of a headline on its own, but together they undo assumptions a lot of sellers were still building their strategy on a year ago. We’ve collected the ones that matter, along with what each concretely means for anyone selling on more than one channel.

Poland is worth reading closely even if you don’t sell there: it’s a large, marketplace-dominated European market where these patterns tend to show up early and in unusually measurable form.

Multichannel isn’t a strategy any more, it’s the baseline

The Polish Chamber of Digital Economy (e-Izba) and its “Omni-commerce. Kupuję wygodnie 2026” (“Omni-commerce. I buy conveniently 2026”) report found that only one in ten consumers completes a purchase within a single channel. For 63% of buyers, whether a brand is present in several places at once genuinely affects the purchase decision. And 100% of Polish internet users have made at least one online purchase — the fourth consecutive year at full coverage, which by itself shows that the Polish market has stopped growing outward, toward new inexperienced buyers, and is now growing inward: the same buyers using more and more channels at once.

That confirms something a lot of sellers already feel. Being present on one channel stopped being a choice; it’s just the starting point. The question worth asking now isn’t “should we be on several channels” but “how well can we actually run them.” The competitive advantage is less and less the decision to add a second or third channel — most of the market has already made that decision. The advantage is whether orders, stock levels and prices across those channels stay consistent, or whether someone is flying between several admin panels by hand and hoping nothing slips. We’ve written up the mechanics of keeping that consistent in how to sync orders and inventory across marketplaces.

Allegro and ERLI are fighting over seller terms

In early 2026, ERLI filed a complaint against Allegro over the Allegro Ceny programme. Until recently, joining it (discounts and free advertising credits) required a seller to keep at least 80% of their offers priced no higher than on other platforms. In practice that meant a seller with lower prices on their own site or on a competing marketplace lost the Allegro promotion — even in categories unrelated to the products in question. Cutting the price of a single product in your own store could cost you the promotion on entirely different products on Allegro, which discouraged any pricing flexibility outside Allegro itself.

Allegro ultimately dropped the condition, opening the programme to all sellers regardless of their pricing policy elsewhere. That directly removes the pressure that had discouraged sellers from competing on price across several platforms at once. It’s exactly the kind of business decision worth tracking if you’re planning pricing across more than one channel, because it points at something broader: the terms of participation in a large platform’s programmes aren’t fixed — they’re subject to competitive pressure from smaller players like ERLI. A seller who only ever read the terms they accepted at registration can go a long time without noticing the rules changed in their favour.

If ERLI is a channel you haven’t tested, we’ve covered how to start selling on ERLI separately.

AI got into the buying process before most sellers were ready

Over 90% of buyers use some form of AI assistance while shopping, and 63% let AI assistants search for and recommend products on their behalf. This is no longer an early-adopter niche; it’s close to standard behaviour. At the same time, 45% of buyers purchase directly through social platforms (TikTok Shop, Instagram), and 66% say influencer recommendations affect their decisions.

For a seller that means a product has to be “visible” not only to a human browsing a category, but to a system filtering and recommending on that human’s behalf. It raises the bar on how complete and current product data is: title, description, attributes, images. An AI assistant choosing products for a buyer works from what’s actually in the offer data — not from what the seller had in mind when they listed it six months ago. A listing with a thin description or missing attributes can still read fine to a person while being effectively invisible to a system filtering results automatically.

That shifts the work from “the product page looks good” to “the data behind it is complete and consistent” — which matters most for a seller running the same catalogue on several platforms at once, each with slightly different data-format requirements.

New ways to pay became normal, not an add-on

49% of buyers used buy-now-pay-later in the last 12 months, and among those who haven’t, 74% say they’re open to trying it. Digital wallets are also gaining as the most convenient payment method: up 6 percentage points year over year.

Together those two numbers point in one direction: buyers increasingly expect the payment method to adapt to them, not the other way round. A checkout without BNPL or a popular digital wallet isn’t a neutral absence of an option any more — it’s a real friction point where some share of customers walks away. For a multichannel seller there’s an extra difficulty on top: payment methods have to be configured and maintained separately on every platform, and what’s available on one channel isn’t necessarily available on another.

Cross-border buying and resale are growing in parallel

40% of buyers shop internationally, and more than half of those use Asian platforms. At the same time, 51% buy second-hand products online and 41% resell themselves. In some categories, recommerce already accounts for 21–30% of spending.

Two parallel trends that look contradictory at first glance (buying new goods from abroad versus buying used) actually show the same thing: Polish consumers care less and less where a product comes from, and more and more about price and convenience. For a seller, that means the competition isn’t just another domestic shop or another local marketplace — it’s every option offering a comparable product cheaper or more conveniently, whether that’s a foreign platform or a neighbour reselling something second-hand. It doesn’t mean you have to compete on price with all of those at once, but it’s worth understanding that the set of options a buyer compares your offer against is far wider than it was a few years ago.

What it adds up to

None of these changes is a revolution on its own, but together they draw a fairly clear picture: the boundaries between sales channels, payment methods and even countries of origin are blurring, and the regulatory and commercial decisions of large platforms (like the Allegro–ERLI dispute) directly shape how a seller can build a pricing strategy.

The common denominator across all five threads is that each one increases the number of places where consistency has to be maintained: prices, product data, payment methods, availability on one more platform. For a single-channel seller that’s mostly market trivia. For a multichannel seller it’s a concrete, growing list of things to keep in sync — and it doesn’t shrink on its own.

Where OpenLinker fits

We’re building OpenLinker: an open-source (Apache 2.0), self-hosted platform that connects your store, marketplaces, shipping and invoicing in one place. It runs on your own infrastructure and carries no per-order fee. That “growing list of things to keep in sync” is precisely the problem it exists to solve — one source of truth for stock and product data instead of several panels and some optimism.

What’s live today: shops PrestaShop and WooCommerce; marketplaces Allegro and ERLI; shipping InPost and DPD; invoicing Subiekt nexo, KSeF and inFakt. OpenLinker is alpha, pre-1.0 — we keep the integrations scorecard current precisely so nobody confuses “planned” with “working.” If you’re weighing this against renting a SaaS channel manager, we’ve laid the comparison out in OpenLinker vs BaseLinker, and the architecture page covers how the platform is built underneath.

• Try the live demo — the OpenLinker admin on sample data.
• See what’s live today — the honest scorecard, gaps included.
• Star the repo — if you want this to exist sooner.

The second half of the year will probably bring more changes like these. We’ll keep writing them up as they land.