Auctioned security

Do you have spare computer equipment or children’s clothes? Do you want to buy a cheap gift for a birthday person, a bicycle for a First Communion, or the latest bestseller? You can sell or buy everything on an online auction portal. Bartek Szambelan – press spokesperson for

Allegro.pl, the largest Polish auction portal – is convinced that if anything attractive appears in Poland, it will be traded on Allegro a day later. After all, there is an opportunity here to negotiate the price and make – as it were, by the way – many other purchases

or sales. It is no wonder, then, that the number of Poles making transactions on the Internet is growing year by year. According to various research companies, 25-40 percent of Polish Internet users are already regularly making purchases online. We are dealing here with a multi-million

crowd of regular buyers. It is also estimated that between half a million and a million customers are added to this market within 12 months. In a report presented in the middle of last year by the Money.pl portal, it was calculated that the percentage of Internet users trading online in Poland

(including those who only occasionally appear on auction portals or in online stores) reaches 42 percent. This would mean that in this activity we do not differ much from developed European countries, where about 49 percent trade, or even from the USA, where over 60 percent of Internet users admit to trading online. Through Allegro.pl alone, which has been operating in Poznań for 7 years, 25 million items worth over PLN 1.5 billion were sold in 2005. This is almost twice as much as the year before. During the last year, the service’s users put 36.5 million items up for sale. This number corresponds to the sum of sales offers from all previous years and best testifies to the dynamics of the service’s operation. The first quarter of this year was also record-breaking. During the first three months, 440,000 user accounts were registered, 13.8 million sales offers were posted, and nearly 10 million items were sold. The value of transactions made (turnover) reached nearly PLN 550 million.