Allegro vs eBay — Which Should You Sell On in 2026?
One owns Poland. The other owns everywhere else. Real fee maths, account rules and the traps in each.
- Choose Allegro if your buyers are in Poland. It reaches 15.5 million active Polish buyers and is the country’s default place to shop. eBay is not close there.
- Choose eBay if your buyers are anywhere else. 136 million active buyers across 190 markets, against Allegro’s four countries.
- Fees are closer than the headlines suggest. Allegro’s blended Polish take rate was 12.26% of GMV in FY2025. eBay charges Polish private sellers 11% plus a regulatory fee — but UK private sellers nothing at all.
- Your account type decides more than the platform does. An eBay private seller in the UK pays zero; the same person in Poland pays 11%. Allegro requires entrepreneurs to use a business account, and its API refuses to list from anything else.
- Allegro charges commission on the delivery the buyer pays, not just the item. eBay does not work that way.
- Used goods are penalised on Allegro in some categories — motoring parts are 16% net for anything not marked new, against 9% for new.
- They are complements, not alternatives. One covers Poland properly; the other covers everywhere Poland is not.
Allegro vs eBay at a glance
This comparison is usually written as though it were a contest, and it is not one. Allegro is the dominant marketplace of a single large country. eBay is a global marketplace that happens to have a small Polish presence. Ask “which is bigger” and eBay wins on every absolute number. Ask “which will sell my thing to a buyer in Kraków” and Allegro wins so decisively that the question is barely worth asking.
So the useful comparison is not size. It is: where are your buyers, what kind of seller are you, and what does each platform actually charge someone in your position?
| Allegro | eBay | |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 1999, Poznań | 1995, California |
| Active buyers | 20.4 million group-wide, 15.5 million in Poland | 136 million |
| GMV | PLN 69.2bn in FY2025; PLN 19.6bn in Q2 2026 alone | $79.6bn in FY2025; $22.4bn in Q2 2026 |
| Growth | Group GMV +14.4% year on year in Q2 2026 | GMV +15% year on year in Q2 2026 |
| Markets | Four: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary | 190 |
| Sellers | 151,100 active selling partners in FY2025 | Not disclosed |
| Catalogue | Over 80 million products | Billions of listings |
| Listing fee | Free on standard offers | A free monthly allowance, then a per-listing fee |
| Seller commission | 1%–17% net by category, plus 23% VAT | £0 for UK private sellers; 5%–14.9% for UK business sellers; 11% for Polish private sellers |
| Currency | PLN, plus CZK, EUR and HUF on the foreign sites | The currency of whichever eBay site you list on |
| Best for | Reaching Poland at scale | Reaching everywhere else |
One thing worth noting on growth, because it is genuinely surprising: these two are growing at almost exactly the same rate. Allegro’s group GMV rose 14.4% year on year in the second quarter of 2026 and eBay’s rose 15%. The difference is that eBay is doing it from a base seven times the size, while Allegro’s growth is increasingly coming from its international segment, which grew 82.4% in the same quarter — off a very small base, and still loss-making.
Reach — and why this is not a fair fight in either direction
In Poland, Allegro is not merely ahead
Allegro reaches 15.5 million active buyers in Poland and describes itself as generating around 1% of Polish GDP. Panel measurement puts Allegro Group at roughly 21.9 million real users across all devices in July 2026, making it the third-largest internet publisher in Poland behind only Google and Meta, and the largest in e-commerce. Its own app is the biggest audited shopping app in the country.
eBay’s Polish site exists and is a real localised marketplace with its own PLN fee schedule — but the traffic gap is roughly fiftyfold. That is not a temporary position. eBay launched in Poland in April 2005, closed its Warsaw office in 2008 when over 90% of its Polish transactions were already cross-border, and relaunched the site in 2022. Its Polish proposition has been export rather than the domestic market for the better part of two decades.
Everywhere else, Allegro barely exists
Allegro operates four marketplaces: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary. The international segment reached about 4.9 million active buyers and roughly a quarter of e-commerce customers in those three neighbouring markets, growing fast — but it was still running an EBITDA loss in 2026, with break-even targeted for 2029. There is no Allegro in Germany, the UK, France or the United States.
eBay is in 190 markets and its whole architecture assumes cross-border trade. For a seller whose stock has any appeal beyond Central Europe, that is not a marginal advantage; it is the only option of the two.
If you are asking which platform to sell on, the honest answer is geographic. Polish buyers: Allegro, and it is not close. Buyers outside Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary: eBay, because Allegro does not reach them at all. The interesting question is not which to choose but whether you can afford to be on only one.
Fees: what each one actually takes
Allegro
Allegro’s model is simple to state and complicated in practice: listing is free and commission is the only base fee. Commission runs from 1% to 17% net across roughly 9,700 categories, with the 1% floor in some over-the-counter medicine lines and the 17% ceiling in the catch-all “other” tails that exist under every department.
Three details make the real number higher than the headline rate:
- Rates are net. Allegro adds 23% VAT on the invoice, so a 11.5% rate costs you 14.15% gross.
- Commission is charged on the item plus the delivery the buyer paid. Allegro’s own worked example is a 100 zł item with 18 zł delivery in a 6% category, charged at 6% of 118 zł. Delivery only leaves the base when the buyer pays nothing for it.
- Delivery co-financing is a separate cost. When the buyer pays nothing because of Allegro Smart!, you contribute to that delivery on a per-parcel band scale — which rose again on 2 March 2026.
- Crosslist from WooCommerce to Allegro
- Crosslist from Shopify to Allegro
- Allegro vs Vinted — which should you sell on?
Some representative rates: fashion is 11.5% net up to 110 zł, then 12.65 zł plus 7.5% on the excess. Books are 8.5% flat. Laptops and televisions are 2.5%. Smartphones are 4.5%. Electronics accessories run 15% up to 60 zł and then 9 zł plus 8%. Beauty sits around 8–10%.
In Allegro’s motoring categories — roughly 1,700 of them — an item marked with condition “Nowy” is charged 9% net capped at 140 zł, and anything not marked new is charged 16% net capped at 140 zł. That is a seven-point difference keyed purely off the condition parameter. If you sell used parts on Allegro, that single field is one of the most expensive checkboxes on the platform.
Allegro’s own reporting shows where all this lands in aggregate: the Polish take rate was 12.26% of GMV in FY2025, up 0.25 points year on year, and 12.65% in Q1 2026. Headline commission rates were not raised for 2026 — Allegro instead introduced maximum caps in some categories — but advertising revenue grew 24% to 2.2% of GMV over the same period. Sellers can pay more overall while the rate card stands still.
Optional costs on top: a featured offer is 19.90 zł per 10 days, or 5.90 zł in fashion and jewellery, plus 0.75 times the category commission. Allegro Ads start at 0.10 zł per click and 0.65 zł in fashion. Subscriptions are optional at 49, 199 or 3,000 zł per 30 days.
eBay
eBay’s fees depend almost entirely on where you are registered and whether you sell as a business.
UK private sellers pay nothing. Since September 2024 there is no final value fee and no regulatory operating fee for UK-based private sellers, excluding cars, motorcycles and vehicles. The buyer pays a Buyer Protection fee instead — a flat 10p per item plus 7% of the item price up to £20, 4% of the portion from £20 to £300, and 2% from £300 to £4,000.
UK business sellers pay category final value fees from 5% to 14.9%, a per-order fee of 30p or 40p, and a 0.35% regulatory operating fee. Clothes, shoes and accessories sit at 11.9%; books, music and video games at 9.9%; jewellery at 14.9% up to £1,000. Shop subscriptions run £27, £77 or £437 a month.
Polish private sellers get 150 free listings a month and then pay a final value fee of 11%, dropping to 2% on the portion above 9,990 zł, plus a per-order fee of 0.25 or 1.35 zł and a 0.43% regulatory operating fee, with an international fee depending on the buyer’s region.
| Fee type | Allegro | eBay |
|---|---|---|
| Listing fee | None on standard offers | Free allowance, then per-listing |
| Commission, fashion | 11.5% net to 110 zł, then 12.65 zł + 7.5% net | UK private £0; UK business 11.9%; PL private 11% |
| Charged on delivery? | Yes, where the buyer pays for it | No |
| VAT on fees | 23% added to net rates | Included in the quoted UK rates |
| Regulatory fee | None separately | 0.35% UK business; 0.43% PL private |
| Buyer-side fee | None as such | Buyer Protection fee on private-seller listings |
| Blended cost | 12.26% of GMV in Poland, FY2025 | Not disclosed by eBay |
| Optional subscription | 49 / 199 / 3,000 zł per 30 days | Shops from £27 a month (UK) |
Private or business — the divide that decides your fees
On both platforms this distinction matters more than most sellers expect, and the two handle it very differently.
Allegro
Allegro requires entrepreneurs selling on Allegro to use a business account, and has done since May 2022. A regular (“konto zwykłe”) account can still list on allegro.pl — a change effective 21 April 2026 confirmed that, with a simplified listing form and 30-day buy-now offers — but Allegro’s listing flow now redirects regular accounts to Allegro Lokalnie by default, with the main-site form reachable through an explicit opt-out link. Private accounts have also carried a 1 zł fee per sold offer since November 2022.
Allegro Lokalnie is the private-seller lane: regular accounts only, up to 1,000 active ads per category, and success fees of 4.9% in Electronics and 7.9% elsewhere. It has no API, which matters if you ever want to automate.
Allegro requires a verified business account for listing through connected tools. Verify your bank account to list, and complete company verification before withdrawing funds or selling on foreign marketplaces.
eBay
eBay’s split is about money rather than access. Anyone can list, and the API is open to any seller. But the fee difference between private and business is enormous in the UK — nothing versus up to 14.9% — and eBay is clear that private-seller status is for genuinely private selling. There is no equivalent of Allegro’s API gate.
A related eBay rule worth planning for: the private-seller free-fee arrangement carries a 300-listing-per-month allowance (400 with a Shop), beyond which a 35p per-listing fee applies, and it excludes cars, motorcycles and vehicles entirely.
The listing experience
Allegro’s listing model is catalogue-first. Offers must be linked to Allegro’s product catalogue, category parameters are enforced tightly, and titles are capped at 75 characters. Descriptions are built from structured sections rather than free HTML. The offer language field accepts exactly two values — Polish and English — and defaults to Polish. Once you open the listing form for an offer, you cannot change its language.
Allegro also publishes trader data on your offers by law: business name, exact address, tax identification number, and the KRS or CEIDG registration number. For a sole trader that includes your own name. That is not optional and it surprises people.
eBay’s model is looser and richer at once. Titles run to 80 characters, descriptions accept HTML at effectively unlimited length, up to 24 photos are supported, and item specifics are per-category with completeness affecting search placement. There is no catalogue-linkage requirement for most second-hand goods.
| Allegro | eBay | |
|---|---|---|
| Title limit | 75 characters | 80 characters |
| Description | Structured sections | HTML, effectively unlimited |
| Photos | Up to 16 | Up to 24 |
| Catalogue linkage | Required — offers must link to the product catalogue | Not required for most used goods |
| Listing language | Polish or English only; fixed once the form is opened | Whatever the site’s language is |
| Multi-quantity | Business accounts only | Supported |
| Auctions | Yes | Yes |
| Trader data shown | Name, address, NIP and KRS/CEIDG published on every offer | Business seller details shown per local law |
One genuinely useful Allegro feature, if you sell across its four markets: it will translate your offers and buyer messages automatically, and you settle in each market’s local currency with an optional conversion back to złoty. You do not need separate accounts for Czechia, Slovakia or Hungary — one account covers all four.
Selling on Allegro from outside Poland
This is the section most comparisons skip, and it is the one that decides whether Allegro is available to you at all.
Allegro accepts foreign sellers and publishes two distinct onboarding routes. If your business tax ID was issued in the European Economic Area — or in Switzerland, Ukraine or the United Kingdom — you register as a business in the same way a Polish entrepreneur would. A UK company is explicitly covered by the EEA route.
If your tax ID was issued anywhere else, you can register only one account and list a maximum of 500 offers, and you will need documents issued within the last four months in both English and your native language.
- You do not need a Polish company. Nothing on Allegro’s registration pages requires a subsidiary or branch.
- You do not need a Polish bank account — but the account you use must accept payments in PLN. Non-EEA sellers can use Payoneer, WorldFirst, LianLian Global or PingPong.
- The seller panel, help centre and API documentation are all available in English, and Allegro states you can contact its support in English.
- Polish VAT registration is ambiguous. Allegro’s English landing page contains one sentence saying you need to be a VAT taxpayer registered in Poland and on the whitelist, while neither of its two authoritative registration articles mentions a Polish NIP at all. Confirm this with Allegro directly rather than relying on either page.
eBay, by contrast, has no equivalent friction. You register on your local eBay site and sell internationally from it, paying an international fee on cross-border orders.
Delivery, Smart! and payouts
Delivery is where Allegro’s model diverges most sharply from eBay’s, because Allegro is not merely a marketplace — it runs a logistics network.
Allegro Smart! is the subscription that makes delivery free to the buyer: 7.7 million subscribers in Poland and around 9 million group-wide, spending on average seven times more than non-subscribers, with a free-delivery order threshold of 49.90 zł. From the seller’s side it is a cost. You contribute to each Smart! delivery on a band scale by order value — currently from 0.99 zł on the smallest orders up to 7.99 zł above 150 zł through Allegro Delivery lockers, and more outside that network. Those bands rose on 2 March 2026, which Allegro attributed to logistics costs and inflation.
Allegro Delivery handles about 45% of Allegro’s parcel volumes through more than 38,000 lockers and 37,000 pick-up points. Allegro Pay, its buy-now-pay-later product, financed 16.1% of GMV in the first quarter of 2026. None of that has an eBay equivalent — eBay leaves postage to the seller’s own postage policy and does not run its own locker network.
On payouts, Allegro pays on demand at any time or on a schedule you set — every business day, weekly or monthly — with a minimum payout of 20 zł. eBay pays on its own schedule, typically within a couple of days of the sale.
One more Allegro obligation to know about, since it can stop you selling: under the EU’s DAC7 rules, implemented in Poland from 1 July 2024, Allegro must report sellers who complete 30 or more transactions or exceed €2,000 of sales in a calendar year. If it asks you for that data and you do not supply it within 60 days, Allegro is legally obliged to block your payouts and then your ability to sell.
How to choose
Choose Allegro if
- Your buyers are Polish, or in Czechia, Slovakia or Hungary. Nothing else comes close in those markets.
- You sell new goods at volume — the platform is built for merchants, not wardrobes.
- Your categories sit at the low end of the rate card: laptops and televisions at 2.5%, smartphones at 4.5%, books at 8.5%.
- You are a registered business, or willing to become one.
Choose eBay if
- Your buyers are anywhere outside Allegro’s four countries.
- You are a UK private seller — you pay eBay nothing at all, which no other option here matches.
- You sell used, collectible or one-off goods, where eBay’s categories and buyer base are strongest.
- You want to sell without registering a business.
- You want your listings to be findable through search engines, which is structurally eBay’s strength.
Be careful if
- You are a Polish private seller assuming eBay is free. It is not — that is the UK rule. You pay 11% plus 0.43%.
- You sell used motoring parts on Allegro. The condition field alone moves you from 9% to 16%.
- You plan to automate Allegro. Its API will not list from a regular account, full stop.
Why not both?
Read the geography back and the answer writes itself. Allegro covers Poland and three neighbours and cannot reach a buyer in Manchester or Munich. eBay covers 190 markets and cannot meaningfully reach a buyer in Poznań. There is almost no overlap in what they are good for, which is the textbook case for running both rather than picking.
The obstacle has never been strategic, it has been clerical. Two catalogues, two taxonomies, two sets of item specifics, two currencies, and — the part that actually bites — two sets of stock levels that have to agree, or you sell the same thing twice.
FLUF Connect imports Allegro listings for you to review and publish on eBay. Check descriptions, category, Item Specifics and price in your chosen eBay currency. Quantity and external reference transfer too. Allegro titles fit within eBay’s 80-character limit. eBay sales end or reduce the matching Allegro offer.
Allegro relisting and offer management are not supported in FLUF; both are available for eBay. Allegro sales do not currently update other channels automatically, so reconcile those sales yourself. See the Allegro to eBay guide for supported sync directions.
FLUF Connect costs £1 for the first 7 days, then plans from £9 a month (Starter). There is no free plan. Crosslisting and inventory sync are included in every plan, and relisting and offer management from Seller upwards rather than sold as add-ons, and every plan covers all your connected channels rather than just these two.
Sources and verification
Marketplace fees and policies change. Check the linked sources before relying on a figure.
- Allegro — seller fees and price list
- Allegro — how sale commission is calculated
- Allegro — Q1 2026 press release (active buyers, merchants, Smart! subscribers, Allegro Pay, Allegro Delivery)
- Allegro — Q4 and FY2025 results presentation (GMV, take rate, advertising revenue)
- Allegro — preliminary Q2 and H1 2026 financial data (unaudited; final results due September 2026)
- Allegro — annual consolidated report 2025 (151,100 active selling partners)
- Allegro — foreign marketplaces
- Allegro Developer — API listing restricted to business accounts
- Allegro — entrepreneurs required to use a business account
- Allegro — registration for EEA and UK sellers
- Allegro — registration for sellers outside the EEA (one account, 500-offer cap)
- Allegro Developer — offer language field (Polish and English only)
- eBay UK — selling fees (no final value fee for UK private sellers)
- eBay UK — fees for business sellers
- eBay Poland — fees for private sellers (11% final value fee)
- eBay UK — Buyer Protection fee
- eBay Inc. — Q2 2026 results (136 million active buyers, $22.4bn GMV)
- eBay Inc. — annual report on Form 10-K (FY2025 GMV and revenue)
- Polish audience measurement figures are from Mediapanel/PBI panel data as reported in the Polish trade press, July 2026. Allegro publishes no market-share figure of its own.
Related guides
- Sell on Allegro — the complete seller guide
- Sell on eBay — the complete seller guide
- Crosslist from Allegro to eBay
- Crosslist from Allegro to Vinted
- eBay vs Kleinanzeigen
- eBay vs Vinted
- All marketplace guides
Related guide
- Crosslist from eBay to Allegro — Poland’s biggest marketplace, and the business-account rule that gates it
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends entirely on who and where you are. Allegro's blended Polish take rate was 12.26% of GMV in FY2025, with fashion commission at 11.5% net up to 110 zł plus 23% VAT. eBay charges Polish private sellers 11% plus a 0.43% regulatory fee, UK business sellers 5% to 14.9%, and UK private sellers nothing at all. The account type and country matter more than the platform.
Yes, when the buyer pays for it. Allegro's own worked example is a 100 zł item with 18 zł delivery in a 6% category, charged at 6% of 118 zł. Delivery only leaves the commission base when the buyer pays nothing for it, which is what Allegro Smart! does — and Smart! carries a separate per-parcel charge to the seller instead. eBay does not calculate fees this way.
Yes. Allegro publishes two routes for foreign businesses: sellers with a tax ID from the EEA, Switzerland, Ukraine or the UK register the same way a Polish entrepreneur does, while sellers from elsewhere may register one account with a maximum of 500 offers. No Polish subsidiary is required and no Polish bank account is required, though your payout account must accept PLN.
Yes on the website, with caveats. A regular account can list on allegro.pl, though the listing flow redirects private sellers to Allegro Lokalnie by default, and private accounts have carried a 1 zł fee per sold offer since November 2022. Allegro also requires anyone selling as a business to use a business account. Critically, the API refuses to list from a regular account at all — that was switched off in July 2022.
Not really. eBay has run a Polish site since 2005, but its Polish traffic is roughly a fiftieth of Allegro's, and over ninety per cent of its Polish transactions were already cross-border when it closed its Warsaw office in 2008. eBay's value to a Polish seller is export, not the domestic market.
In its motoring categories — around 1,700 of them — an item marked with condition 'Nowy' is charged 9% net capped at 140 zł, while anything not marked new is charged 16% net capped at 140 zł. That seven-point gap keys entirely off the condition parameter, so it is one of the more expensive fields on the platform if you sell used parts.
eBay, by a distance in absolute terms: 136 million active buyers against Allegro's 20.4 million group-wide. But Allegro has 15.5 million of them in Poland alone, where it is the third-largest internet publisher of any kind and the largest in e-commerce. Absolute scale is the wrong measure if your buyers are Polish.
Yes. One Allegro account covers all four marketplaces, and Allegro will translate your offers and buyer messages automatically. You set prices in each market's currency — CZK for Czechia, EUR for Slovakia and HUF for Hungary — with an optional automatic price converter, and settle in each currency or convert back to złoty.
Yes, and given how little their reach overlaps it is usually the right answer. FLUF Connect reads your Allegro offers, flattens the structured descriptions, maps categories and item specifics, converts the price into the eBay site's currency, and carries quantity and your reference ID across intact. It ends or reduces the Allegro offer when something sells on eBay. Plans start at £1 for 7 days, then from £9/month. There is no free plan.