E-commerce Poland – where does it go?

Competitive advantages with cross-border expansion in 2019 and beyond

As every year, our team was visiting the national e‑commerce expo (https://targiehandlu.pl/) in Warsaw, which took place last week. Poland’s e‑commerce grows this year by 25% vs. PY, thus is booming and offers interesting opportunities. This year’s expo showed 2 trends very clearly:

»Cross border e‑commerce«– more and more active e‑shops in Poland are expanding their sales activities abroad. Poland has plenty of national online businesses and still room for international players to come. However, for national players, the market gets narrow, so expansion abroad is a clear visible strategy. Although the trend to go international is there for years, international shipping is still expensive, overall if you have low sales and parcel volumes to start with. Reaching for example neighbouring German customers in 2-3 days was surely a great disadvantage vs. any German e‑tailers. Now they are ready to expand fast, first into neighbouring countries within CEE and then for the rest of Europe and are looking for….

»Logistics services«– with the rapid development of the e‑commerce sector, more and more logistics players enter the playground. Mainly carriers desperate for a quick win in decreasing classical freight forwarding are trying to enter the segment by producing 1-2 flyers promoting e‑logistics services. However, the processes for perfect e‑fulfilment is much more sophisticated than storing a few hundred pallets and new players are lacking e-commerce experience, thus struggle to compete with the real e-fulfilment specialists.

A national e‑business in Poland, wanting to go international is no longer shopping for cheap but for a partner that can offer logistics and a flawless fulfilment also on an international level.

Services shall not only include receipt, storage, pick & pack and distribution, but moreover sending tracked parcels outside of Poland, within Europe, at reasonable prices and delivery times.

Whereas this is a huge challenge for all logistics companies, thus they do not get great freight tariffs for all destinations, i.e. they may have good tariffs for Germany, but not for Spain – and delivery time is a real shopping chart stopper.

At Internel, we are a major player in e‑commerce logistics for many years, observing but also setting trends and service levels here in Poland and the entire region. We are scouting trends, discussing better and more innovative services with our clients and carriers on a regular basis. Thanks to that we were able to predict this trend and know pretty well, where the travel is going.

We already advanced the clear trend for cross-border sales years ago and are since then working on a great network of reliable carriers and sub-carriers – at competitive prices. And we are still working hard to reach the most remote European destinations at great shipping prices by creating our own parcel hubs within Europe, offering a great regional distribution service, efficient, low-cost and ideally free return handling and also COD deliveries in those countries where cash payments are a must.

If you would like to know more what we can do for your business, please get in touch; we are happy to hear from you and to support your fast, international sales expansion.

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