When you weigh your own online store vs Allegro, Poland's leading online marketplace, Allegro pays off more when you sell products that customers buy once and compare on price, and you have neither the budget nor the time to win traffic. Your own store pays off more when customers come back for more, when they buy products they will not find in identical form from other sellers, or when the brand is part of what you sell. In many companies, the best result comes from selling in both channels at once, provided the stock levels are shared.
"Store versus marketplace" comparisons usually stop at the commission. The commission, however, is only one item. Just as important are the cost of acquiring a customer, whether you can contact that customer a second time, and what happens to your sales when the platform changes its rules. Below we go through each of these and work out the same product in both channels on explicit assumptions.
- On Allegro you pay on every order, including from a customer buying from you for the fifth time. In your own store you pay mainly for the first order, and repeat purchases are cheap.
- Allegro brings traffic from day one. For its first months, your own store has only the traffic you bring to it yourself.
- A buyer on Allegro is the platform's customer: their email address is masked, and the rules restrict steering them to other sales channels.
- Consumer obligations (returns, complaints, information on the lowest price, product safety data) apply to you in both channels.
- Selling in both channels works when orders from Allegro and from the store draw on the same stock.
Your own online store vs Allegro: what you are really comparing
Allegro is above all traffic. People who search for a product directly in Allegro's search engine see your offer from the day it is listed, without any work on search rankings or campaigns. You pay for that traffic with a commission on sales and with optional fees for promoted listings and ads. You do not pay for building a store, for hosting or for anyone finding out that you exist.
Your own store is a channel that belongs to you. The customer lands on your domain, leaves an email address, signs up for the newsletter and next time comes to you directly. You pay for building and maintaining the store and for acquiring traffic, which at the start is close to zero. In return, every further order from the same customer costs you a fraction of the first one.
So these two models differ in how the costs are spread over time. Allegro has a constant cost per order, regardless of whether the customer is new or returning. Your own store has a high fixed cost at the start and a high cost for the first order, which falls every time the customer comes back. Which model works out cheaper depends on how often your customers buy again.
Hence the first question worth asking before everything else: how many times a year does an average customer buy from you? If you sell tents, the answer is once every few years. If you sell dog food, it is once a month. That one number says more about the choice of channel than any comparison of commission rates.
What selling on Allegro costs
The basic cost is the sales commission, charged as a percentage of the order value and dependent on the product category. Rates differ between categories and Allegro changes them from time to time, so the only reliable source is the current price list on the site for your specific category. Do not base your calculations on rates from articles that are a year old, including this one.
On top of the commission come costs that are not mandatory, but without which it is hard to sell in practice. The Allegro Smart programme, in which the buyer gets free delivery and the seller covers part of its cost. Fees for promoting listings. Allegro Ads, billed per click, which for popular products often decide whether your offer appears high in the results at all.
The third group of costs is less visible. Allegro's ranking of offers takes into account, among other things, the price, the delivery terms and the quality of the seller's service. For products sold by many sellers, this means pressure on price: the customer sees your offer next to identical ones, sorted from the cheapest. Cutting your price to hold your position is also a cost of the channel, even if it does not show up on the invoice from Allegro.
On the plus side, you do not pay for building a store, a payment gateway or a certificate, or for acquiring customers in the classic sense. Payments, buyer protection, the rating system and part of the communication with customers all work within the platform. For a company that is only starting to sell online, this is a real saving in work, not just in money.
What your own store costs
Your own store has one-off and ongoing costs. The one-off costs are building the store, terms of service and a privacy policy prepared or checked by a lawyer, product photos and descriptions (if you sell on Allegro, you already have them) and setting up payments and shipping. The ongoing costs are the platform subscription or hosting, the domain, the payment provider's commission on every transaction and technical maintenance.
Below are indicative market ranges in 2026 for a store with a few dozen to a few hundred products. They are a point of reference, not research and not our price list. The amounts are net.
| Item | Indicatively | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Build on a subscription platform | PLN 2,000 - 10,000 | plus a monthly subscription |
| Build on an open source system | PLN 5,000 - 25,000 | plus hosting and updates |
| Store built for your company | PLN 10,000 - 60,000 and more | higher start-up cost, full control over the features |
| Platform subscription or hosting | from a few dozen to a few hundred PLN a month | depending on the number of products and the traffic |
| Payment provider | commission per transaction | rates depend on the provider and the payment method |
| Terms of service and privacy policy | from a few hundred PLN | a template from the internet does not describe your rules for returns and delivery |
The biggest cost is not in this table: acquiring traffic. A new store without a marketing budget has no visitors. The first orders come from Google ads, social media campaigns, price comparison sites or from the customer base you already have. Each of these channels costs money, and at the start the cost of one order from a new customer is sometimes higher than the commission on Allegro.
That is why a store without a plan for traffic is the most expensive option of all. Before you order a build, work out where the first hundred orders will come from and how much each of them will cost. If you have no answer, start with Allegro and come back to the idea of a store once you know which customers return.
Example: the same product worked out in both channels
The calculation below shows the mechanics, not real rates. All the amounts and percentages are assumptions made for the example. Before you decide, plug in your own numbers: the current commission rate from Allegro's price list for your category, your payment provider's rate and the real cost of advertising in your industry. For simplicity, we leave VAT out.
The assumptions: a product sold for PLN 200, a cost of goods of PLN 110 and packing at PLN 3. On Allegro: a 10% commission, a PLN 5 share of the delivery cost and advertising averaging PLN 8 per order. In your own store: a 1.5% payment provider fee, PLN 30 to acquire a new customer through ads, PLN 2 to bring a customer back through the newsletter, and fixed store costs of PLN 300 a month spread over 100 orders, which is PLN 3 per order.
| Item per order | Allegro | Store, new customer | Store, returning customer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sale price | PLN 200 | PLN 200 | PLN 200 |
| Cost of goods | -PLN 110 | -PLN 110 | -PLN 110 |
| Packing | -PLN 3 | -PLN 3 | -PLN 3 |
| Platform commission or payment provider fee | -PLN 20 | -PLN 3 | -PLN 3 |
| Delivery cost borne by the seller | -PLN 5 | PLN 0 | PLN 0 |
| Acquiring the order (ads, newsletter) | -PLN 8 | -PLN 30 | -PLN 2 |
| Fixed store costs per order | PLN 0 | -PLN 3 | -PLN 3 |
| Left per order | PLN 54 | PLN 51 | PLN 79 |
On these assumptions, the first order in your own store brings in less than an order on Allegro. The picture reverses only when the customer comes back: each further order in the store leaves PLN 79, while on Allegro it is still PLN 54, because the commission and advertising are charged on every sale. A customer who buys from you five times a year leaves PLN 51 + 4 x 79 = PLN 367 in your store, and 5 x 54 = PLN 270 on Allegro.
Three conclusions follow from the example that do not depend on specific rates. First, your own store wins only when customers come back and you have a way of encouraging them to. Second, the store's fixed costs are spread across the number of orders, so with 20 orders a month the same PLN 300 means PLN 15 per order, not PLN 3. Third, if acquiring a new customer in your industry costs PLN 60 rather than PLN 30, the store comes out ahead only on the second or third return.
Before you build a store, check in your Allegro order history how many buyers have bought from you more than once. The orders show the buyer's login, so repeat purchases can be counted. If repeat purchases are rare, your own store will be hard to make pay, however well it is built.
Whose customer is it, and who sets the rules
On Allegro, the buyer is the platform's customer, and you fulfil their order. You see the buyer's email address in masked form, in the allegromail.pl domain. A message sent to that address reaches the customer, but you do not know their real address and cannot use it for anything beyond handling the order. Ratings and sales history are tied to your Allegro account, and you cannot take them anywhere else.
Allegro's rules also restrict steering buyers towards sales outside the platform. An offer with a link to your own store and an encouragement to buy more cheaply outside Allegro breaks the rules. Before you put anything in the parcel that leads to your store, check the current wording of the rules. Sellers handle this in different ways, but the risk falls on the account your sales depend on.
In your own store, the customer leaves a real email address and can agree to marketing communication. You can send them a reminder when they are about to run out of a product, offer a discount on the company's anniversary or let them know about a new delivery. Each of these contacts is an order with no advertising cost, which is the "returning customer" column from the example above. There is one condition: consent has to be given freely, separately from accepting the terms of service and with the option to withdraw it, so plan the consent mechanism when the store is being built, not after a year of selling.
If you sell only on Allegro, you base your business on rules you have no influence over. The platform can change its commission price list, the terms of the Smart programme, the rules for ranking offers or its requirements for sellers. Every change like this affects all sellers at once, and your only response is to adapt or to move sales that you have nowhere to move to.
The second form of dependence is the account. A breach of the rules, a dispute with a buyer or a series of negative ratings can lead to the account being restricted. For a company whose entire sales go through one account, a suspension of even a few days means no revenue during that time. Your own store does not remove this risk, but it means the risk no longer applies to all of your sales.
That does not mean Allegro is risky and a store is safe. Your own store has its own dependencies: on Google ads, whose prices also change, on the payment provider and on hosting. The difference is that in a store you have several independent sources, and none of them controls traffic, payments and contact with the customer all at once.
Where the traffic comes from: Allegro provides it, a store has to win it
Allegro solves the traffic problem for you. A customer searches for a product, and your offer appears in the results from the day it is listed. Its position depends on price, delivery terms, quality of service and advertising, but the traffic itself is there. That is the platform's greatest advantage, and the reason most companies start selling online there.
Your own store has to build its traffic from several sources. Google lets you show products in the Shopping tab for free once you submit a product feed to Google Merchant Center, and you pay for higher positions with Shopping ads. Price comparison sites, such as the Polish site Ceneo, charge per click. Search engines start bringing traffic to product and category descriptions after months of work on the content. Social media and the newsletter work best for products people want to read about and want to show off.
Each of these sources needs work or budget, and usually both. A store that sits waiting for customers after launch will not get any, because nobody knows it exists. Companies that move successfully from a marketplace to their own store usually already have one of these channels: a community on social media, a base of customers from a physical shop or a recognisable product name.
The brand name is particularly important here. A customer who bought a product on Allegro with your brand on the packaging and wants to buy it again may type the brand name into Google. If they find your store, they land in a channel where they stay. If you sell other companies' products without a brand of your own, this mechanism does not work, because the customer will go back to Allegro and buy from the cheapest seller.
Legal obligations in both channels
Some obligations towards consumers apply to you no matter where you sell. A customer buying at a distance has the right to withdraw from the contract within 14 days without giving a reason, with the exceptions provided for in the law. Complaints about goods that do not conform to the contract are handled in the same way on Allegro as in your own store. Since 2021, some of these rights have also applied to sole traders when the purchase is not of a professional nature for them.
Since 1 January 2023, when you reduce a price you have to show the product's lowest price from the 30 days before the reduction. Since 13 December 2024, the EU General Product Safety Regulation has required an online offer to include, among other things, the manufacturer's details, the details of the responsible person in the EU, product identification, and warnings and safety information. Both obligations apply to every sales channel.
The difference lies in who prepares the tools. On Allegro, the offer form has fields for the data the law requires, some of the sales rules are set by the platform's terms, and you set your return and complaint terms in ready-made forms. In your own store, you are responsible for the terms of service, the privacy policy, the pre-contractual information, the mechanism for calculating the lowest price and the fields for product safety data, and the store has to handle all of this technically.
Then there is digital accessibility. Since 28 June 2025, the Polish act implementing the European Accessibility Act has been in force, and it covers, among other things, e-commerce services. Microenterprises providing services are, as a rule, exempt from these obligations, but larger companies have to make sure their store is accessible. If you do not know whether the rules cover you, check before the build, because adapting a finished store costs more than planning for it from the start.
Which products sell better on Allegro, and which in your own store
Allegro works best for products the customer already knows before they start searching. Electronics with a specific model number, spare parts, popular accessories, books, toys from well-known brands. The customer types in the product name, compares prices and delivery times, and buys from whoever comes out best. The choice of seller is secondary, and a platform that gathers all the offers in one place serves that customer best.
Your own store works well for products the customer buys regularly and from a seller they trust. Coffee from a roastery, pet food, cosmetics, supplements, consumables for businesses. A customer who has once found a product that suits their needs wants to buy it again without searching from scratch, and an email reminder or a subscription with automatic delivery turns them into steady revenue.
The second type of product for your own store is one that needs explaining or configuring. Made-to-measure furniture, personalised products, sets the customer configures, products that come with advice before the purchase. A marketplace offer form has no room for a configurator or a guide, and the customer needs them to make a decision. Your own store can have exactly the purchase process the product requires.
The third type is selling to businesses. A business customer expects an individual price list, orders with deferred payment, consolidated invoices and an order history for several people in the company. Allegro does have solutions for business buyers, but a store with a price list assigned to a specific customer and integration with that customer's ordering system is a different level of service, which is hard to recreate on a general-purpose platform.
| Product or customer trait | Better on Allegro | Better in your own store |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase frequency | once or rarely | regularly, every week or month |
| Comparability | the same product from many sellers | your own brand, a product that is hard to compare |
| Purchase process | picking from a list, a single decision | configuration, advice, personalisation |
| Type of customer | a consumer looking for the best price | a regular customer, a business with individual terms |
| Stage of the company | starting out, testing demand, no budget for traffic | a known brand, a customer base, your own traffic channels |
The hybrid model: Allegro to acquire customers, the store for repeat purchases
Many companies do not choose between the channels, but give them different jobs. Allegro is used to acquire new customers, because that is where people who do not know you search for products. Your own store serves customers who already know the brand and want to buy without an intermediary, as well as products that are not worth listing on the platform.
The technical condition is shared stock. If you sell the same product in two places and update the stock levels by hand, sooner or later you will sell the last item twice and have to cancel one of the orders. On Allegro, cancelling an order through the seller's fault can affect your sales quality rating. Allegro provides a public API through which a store can list offers, fetch orders and update stock levels, so the synchronisation can be automated.
The integration can be done in one of two ways. The first is an external multichannel sales system that connects the store, Allegro and other channels in one panel, paid for by subscription. The second is an integration built directly into the store, which needs no additional subscription but has to be maintained whenever Allegro's API changes. The choice depends on the number of channels: with two, a direct integration is often simpler, and with five, an external system usually works out cheaper.
The hybrid model also needs a pricing policy. If a product costs the same on Allegro as in the store, the customer has no reason to move to the store, but if it is clearly cheaper in the store, the platform may treat that as an incentive to buy outside it. Most often the store stands out not on price, but on what Allegro does not have: a loyalty programme, subscriptions, the full range, bundles, direct contact.
Technology for your own store: subscription, open source or a store built for your company
Once the decision on your own store has been made, the choice of technology remains. Each of the three routes has cases where it is the best one, and there is no single answer for everyone.
| Solution | Start-up cost | Ongoing cost | Limitations | When it makes sense |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription platform (e.g. Shoper, Shopify) | low | a monthly subscription, sometimes a commission | only the features the provider has foreseen | starting out, a typical range, no technical team |
| Open source system (e.g. WooCommerce, PrestaShop) | medium | hosting, plugin licences, updates | every unusual feature is a plugin or a modification | a medium-sized store with typical processes and a budget for upkeep |
| Store built for your company | higher | hosting and development | no ready-made ecosystem of plugins | an unusual purchase process, integrations, B2B, large scale |
A subscription platform is the fastest route to a working store. You do not think about the server, updates or security. The problem is everything the provider did not foresee: an unusual configurator, a price list for businesses with per-customer discounts, a specific integration with a wholesaler. Such features are either unavailable or need workarounds that break when the platform changes.
An open source system gives you more freedom, but shifts the maintenance onto you. Updates to the system and the plugins, compatibility between them, security and performance under heavier traffic are an ongoing cost that has to be planned for. A store with dozens of plugins from different authors can be hard to develop, because every change may break something somewhere else.
A store built for your company makes sense when the sales process departs from the typical basket: selling to businesses at individual prices, configurable products, subscriptions, integrations with warehouse and accounting systems. The higher start-up cost pays off in that every feature works exactly as your process requires, and the code belongs to you and can be developed by any contractor.
How to pay for the build so the start-up cost does not eat up the first year
The most common barrier to having your own store is not the cost of maintenance, but the one-off spend on the build, which has to be made before the store sells anything. A company that sells on Allegro today and pays commission only on its sales suddenly has to pay upfront for a channel that will only start earning in a few months.
That is why, for online stores, we offer more than a one-off quote. With us, you can pay for the store build as a percentage, which is closer to the commission model familiar from marketplaces than a one-off invoice at the start, or as part of a monthly arrangement that covers hosting, monitoring and further development of the store. Prices for online stores and e-commerce start from PLN 1,699, and we give a specific figure once the scope, deadline and requirements have been agreed. We describe the scope in detail on our online stores page, and integrations with other systems on the integrations and automation page, from PLN 299.
With a one-off payment, we usually split it into three parts: a deposit, halfway through the project and on handover. The price includes a buffer for fixes equal to 15% of the project time, and during the work you have access to the repository and the test version of the store. On handover you get full rights to the code and documentation, so another contractor can develop the store, and monitoring is free, usually for 90 days.
Whoever you build your store with, check three things before you sign the contract. Whether the product and order data can be exported if you want to change platforms. Whether the code and the domain belong to you. Whether the ongoing costs after the first year are described as precisely as the cost of the build. The other points worth checking in an offer are collected in our article how to read a software development quote.
Where to start
If you do not sell online yet, start with Allegro. Listing offers costs little, there is traffic from day one, and after a few months you know which products sell, at what price and how many customers come back. That is data without which planning your own store is guesswork.
If you have been selling on Allegro for a while, work out three numbers from your order history: the share of customers who have bought more than once, the total spent on commission and advertising over the last 12 months, and the margin on your best-selling products. Plug them into the example in this article in place of the assumptions. If the channel costs for a year are higher than the cost of building and maintaining a store, and customers come back, your own store makes financial sense.
If you have your own brand, regular customers or products that need configuring, plan the store from the start as a second channel alongside Allegro, with shared stock. Describe your product range, current sales channels and processes to us via the contact form. Quotes are free, we reply within an hour and you talk to the person who will write the code for your store.
