Can you share your experience in business development, and how you are doing it now? Are you still looking at other platforms or do you focus only on your users and the needs of the local market?

My beginning at Allegro was about patching big holes, even though I previously mentioned individual features that we had on the marketplace platform. At that stage, eBay was our role model and role model in the world - it was the largest marketplace at that time and we focused on it. We checked the differences, what to introduce on our platform based on eBay, and the needs of our users were rather a supplement. You could actually say that we copied the most interesting solutions from the largest player that could be attractive to our customers, both buyers and sellers. Now our approach is much more mature. The platform is much more feature-rich and there are fewer quick wins because the feature set we work with is already quite exhaustive. Very often we think about simplifying or even removing certain features, replacing them with others, or even replacing them with new processes. A certain set of features at a given stage was sufficient relating to the platform's effectiveness or user convenience, but this state may change as the platform’s complexity grows further. For example, along with the scale of sales - some processes must be automated to be practical for the merchants, e.g. Order status changes or integration with an external process management systems like external warehouse.

Now, with such a high level of complexity of the platform and the entire business, serving tens of thousands of merchants and millions of consumers, how do you structure the approach to further development? Do you create hypotheses relying on research or benchmarks in other markets? What is your process now?

We start from certain hypotheses, although these hypotheses are more often posed in the context of consumers and their behaviour, e.g. “by changing this or that feature/process, we could improve the convenience of using certain parts of the platform”. When it comes to sellers, here we also study their needs and problems, but these are less often hypotheses, and more often specific observations of what this group is struggling with. Usually, each of these entrepreneurs strives to develop their business and they do it at a different pace, and we (as a marketplace to serve many differently developing businesses) usually chase them because we have to adapt to many different groups with different needs. This needs a lot of focus, and many decisions on prioritisation. Hence, our research is very well developed here. We have a large team that constantly analyzes how merchants work, and what tools they use - whether they are ours or, whether they are external. Sometimes we even analyse these external tools, looking for some efficiency or ineffectiveness, because these tools must also work well with our marketplace.

Do you think that the Polish market has a lot of space for new marketplaces?

The first thing is the space in the market. Poland is very enterprise oriented and our market is growing very fast. The share of e-commerce in Poland is growing, and the adoption of all mobile solutions is usually in the top 3 in Europe. Therefore, here e.g. Apple Pay and Google Play appeared very quickly. Other example - banking applications are also very well developed compared to western countries, they win various awards for the experience. Generally speaking, Poles are adopting new digital and mobile solutions very quickly. This demand is creating is a lot of space on the market. The confirmation of this observation is the very fact that many different platforms enter Poland’s digital market and try to take-off here.

What I am observing is a large increase in marketplace initiatives in the B2B segment in various industries. Is it a strategy for every company or a new buzzword? What do you see as the prospects for the development of this business model?

The meaning of this buzzword is changing, because some time ago it probably meant something a little different. With the development of e-commerce platforms, it meant meeting the buyer with the seller. Today, more and more often it means different things. It is not a combination of the buyer and the seller because it is actually just a combination of different parties in order to optimize business activity. I do not want to mention the transaction here, because marketplaces are not always focused on the transactions. Sometimes they just serve to facilitate certain activities. Again, this is the art of discovering a need or a problem to be addressed on the market, i.e. this famous strived for product-market fit. If only we start to connect sides of the market, we are already slowly talking about the marketplace. There might be a discussion about whether this is the correct interpretation or not, but I don't think it matters. I think more and more this concept of a marketplace is just generalising and starting to mean ‘linking sides of the market’. The key is: what problem are we solving for the sides, in what business model, how to make money on it, and what responsibility to take?

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