Poland: The Market That Engineered Its Way Out of Cash on Delivery

Cash on delivery has fallen below 5% of Polish ecommerce, and it did not disappear because Polish consumers stopped wanting the guarantee it offered. It disappeared because parcel lockers plus instant mobile payment at pickup gave them the same thing — control over the handover, payment at the moment of collection — without the merchant carrying refusal risk. Italy, with the same underlying consumer instinct, still runs 18–22% cash on delivery nationally. Poland engineered its way out of a problem Italy is still absorbing, and the mechanism is worth understanding by anyone selling anywhere that COD persists.

A country analysis from Digital, Ecommerce & Performance Marketing in Europe. Read alongside Italy for the contrast. Last reviewed August 2026.

1. How Poland solved cash on delivery

The COD instinct is universal and rational: the buyer wants to see the parcel before parting with money, and the merchant wants payment before losing the goods. Most markets resolve this badly, either by carrying refusal risk or by excluding the customers who need the reassurance.

Poland resolved it with infrastructure. InPost’s Paczkomat network — reported at over 25,000 machines by the end of 2024 and 28,000 by the end of 2025, with more recent figures citing 40,000 — is preferred by between 81% and 90% of Polish online shoppers. Combined with BLIK, the domestic instant mobile payment standard, the customer collects on their own schedule and pays at the moment of pickup.

Sources: 2026 Polish marketplace analysis reporting cash on delivery below 5%, attributed to InPost locker delivery combined with BLIK at pickup; InPost network figures of 25,000+ machines at end 2024 and 28,000+ by end 2025, with a 2026 source citing 40,000+; reported locker preference of 81–90%. The causal claim is my interpretation rather than a published finding — the correlation is well documented, the mechanism is inferred.

For anyone running Polish ecommerce marketing this is not merely historical context. It means the checkout and delivery decision is the conversion decision, and that a merchant offering courier-only delivery is competing against a national habit rather than against other merchants.

2. Four numbers for Allegro, all of them true

Allegro’s dominance is universally reported and inconsistently quantified, which is worth pausing on because the figures are not interchangeable.

Sources: Allegro Group investor relations 2024 for market share, active buyers and monthly visits; 2026 market guides for the higher share and reach figures. Share of ecommerce, share of marketplace traffic and reach of internet users are three different denominators — a recurring theme in this cluster and the reason to ask what any headline percentage counts.

For Polish digital marketing planning the competitive context matters more than the exact number. Allegro has operated since 1999 from Poznań, while Amazon.pl only launched in 2021 and is reported to be still building. But Allegro is not unchallenged: Temu briefly surpassed it in monthly users in May 2025, and Amazon opened a third fulfilment centre slated for 2026 intended to lift next-day coverage to 85% of households.

Poland also has an unusually deep marketplace ecosystem for its size — Allegro, Amazon.pl, Empik, Ceneo, Morele.net and Erli, the last positioning as a zero-commission challenger. Ceneo is the dominant price comparison engine with over 19 million monthly visitors, which matters in a market repeatedly described as highly price sensitive.

3. BLIK, and why the reported share ranges from 35% to 76%

BLIK is the Polish domestic instant mobile payment standard, reported to process over two billion transactions annually for more than 18 million users. Its dominance is not in question. Its measured share is, and the spread is instructive.

Sources as listed. The gap between 35% and 76% is almost certainly a denominator difference — stated preference, checkout share and transaction value share are three different things — but none of the sources defines its measure precisely enough to reconcile them. Treat the direction as certain and any single figure as directional.

The practical instruction does not depend on resolving that. Every source agrees BLIK must be offered, every marketplace integrates it natively, and omitting it is listed among the most damaging market entry errors. Fast bank transfers follow at around 64%, with Allegro Pay and PayU also present, and cards universal but primarily required for cross-border.

4. The logistics war nobody outside Poland is watching

This is the most commercially interesting development in the market and it has a date attached.

Allegro and InPost operate under a seven-year partnership that expires in 2027. Meanwhile Allegro has been building its own locker network — adding more than 1,000 in Poland during 2024 to exceed 4,500 total, with around 500 in the Czech Republic, and a further 2,500 planned. Its chief financial officer described the focus as increasing the share of parcels going through managed delivery methods, giving more choice and control while reducing average price.

Sources: Reuters reporting of Allegro’s post-earnings comments and analyst commentary from Trigon brokerage noting the expenditure increase as a negative signal for InPost, whose shares fell on the announcement. Forward-looking elements are analyst expectation rather than fact.

Why this matters for Polish performance marketing rather than only for investors: the delivery option a customer sees at checkout is currently the product of a commercial arrangement with a defined end date. If the parcel network landscape changes in 2027, so does the checkout experience that a large share of Polish conversion currently depends on. Building a delivery strategy tied exclusively to one network carries a dated risk.

5. Poland is a launchpad, not a destination

The most underused fact about the Polish market is that it is an entry point to a region rather than an endpoint.

Allegro launched marketplaces in Czechia in 2023, then Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia in 2024, and acquired the Czech marketplace mall.cz. Reported guidance is that all of these are reachable from a single Polish Allegro seller account with automatic translation.

For a brand weighing Central European expansion, that is a materially different proposition from opening four separate market operations. One account, one integration, one logistics relationship, four additional countries — against the alternative of separate marketplace onboarding in each. Allegro reports roughly 21 million active buyers group-wide across the region against around 15 million in Poland alone.

6. What Polish consumers actually reward

The consistent picture across sources, and the one that should shape any Polish ecommerce marketing plan, is a market that is digitally sophisticated, mobile-first and unusually price-conscious.

Based on 2026 Polish market entry analyses. The language row is emphasised repeatedly across sources and is the error most commonly made by international sellers treating Poland as a secondary market.

7. Two compliance items with dates

KSeF e-invoicing became mandatory for B2B and B2G transactions from February 2026. That is an accounting and systems obligation rather than a marketing one, but it belongs in any market entry plan because it affects how transactions must be documented from day one.

On the marketing side, Poland is reported among the stricter European markets for outbound, typically requiring consent even for B2B email — a position covered in the European B2B analysis, and one that places it closer to Germany than to France or the Netherlands. Standard EU frameworks otherwise apply, with VAT at 23%.

8. How large the market is, with the usual caveat

Sources as listed. Three figures, three currencies and three growth rates for the same market and year — the spread reflects differing scope and methodology rather than disagreement about direction. Poland is consistently described as Central and Eastern Europe’s largest ecommerce market, with 38 million people and around 87% internet penetration.

9. What this adds up to

Poland is the clearest case in this cluster of a market where local infrastructure beat global platforms on their own terms. Allegro outcompetes Amazon on home ground. BLIK outcompetes international wallets. InPost lockers outcompete courier delivery. None of that is protectionism — each won because it fitted the market better, and a foreign entrant that arrives with a card-and-courier stack is not being penalised for being foreign but for being worse.

The strategic read for Polish digital marketing is therefore unusually simple to state and unusually demanding to execute: adopt the local stack completely, or expect to lose to companies that have. List on Allegro, integrate BLIK, offer lockers, join Smart!, write in Polish properly, and price for a market that will compare you on Ceneo before it buys. Do that and Poland is Central Europe’s largest ecommerce market with a single-account route into four more. Do half of it and you will conclude the market is difficult, when what was actually difficult was the decision to import a stack that does not fit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Most European market guides describe Poland as fast-growing and price-sensitive, which is true and not very useful. The more interesting thing about it is that it is the European market that solved a problem the rest of the continent is still managing. Cash on delivery went below 5% not through consumer education or merchant refusal but because somebody built 25,000 lockers and a payment rail that works at them.

That is worth carrying beyond Poland. Wherever cash on delivery is eating margin — southern Italy, and a great many markets outside Europe entirely — the Polish answer suggests the problem was never really the payment method. It was the handover. Solve the handover and the payment method follows. For Polish performance marketing specifically, the implication is narrower and immediate: the local stack is not a preference to accommodate, it is the market, and adopting it partially is the most reliable way to conclude that Poland is harder than it is.