Selling on Allegro — Fees, Smart! and Marketplace API Integration

Selling on a marketplace and selling from your own store run on two different cost structures. On Allegro, listing is free and you pay a commission on every sale — including on the delivery the buyer pays for — and, in the Smart! programme, a per-parcel fee. Your own store has no commission at all, but you have to bring every visitor yourself, through ads, SEO or email, and you pay for payments and shipping on your own contracts. Marketplace integration only pays off once both channels share one warehouse and one order list — otherwise you're running two businesses with one set of stock.

This article sets out what Allegro charges (pages and price lists read on 30 September and 1 October 2026), compares one order on Allegro and in your own store, uses Allegro's REST API as a worked example of authorisation and rate limits, and gives a framework for deciding between a ready-made integrator or platform integration and your own code.

What Allegro charges

Allegro is the main marketplace for Polish sellers. Per the company's own Q2 2026 investor results, it reports 21 million active buyers (15.6 million in Poland, 5.3 million abroad), more than 90 million products from over 150,000 sellers, more than 9 million users of its Smart! delivery programme, Allegro Pay at 16.4% of GMV and Polish GMV up 12% year on year (Allegro Q2 2026 press release); full-year 2025 GMV was "approaching PLN 70 billion" (Q4 2025 press release). These are the company's own figures about its own business, not an independent market study.

The only basic fee is a commission by category: for example, 2.5% net for laptops and 17% for "Other", with many categories capped, most often at PLN 140. It is charged also on delivery paid by the buyer, but not on free or Smart! delivery (commission table effective 2.03.2026). In Smart! you pay a per-parcel seller fee by delivery method and order value: for an InPost locker from PLN 1.59 (order PLN 30–44.99) to PLN 9.99 gross (from PLN 150); for example PLN 3.19 for an order of PLN 45–64.99, PLN 7.89 for PLN 100–149.99 (PLN 6.19 for an Allegro Delivery locker), and PLN 9.99 from PLN 150 (PLN 7.99 for Allegro Delivery) — Annex 4 to the Allegro Terms, art. 15.2. Cash on delivery in Smart! costs an extra PLN 4.99, paid back by the buyer (Allegro help).

Smart! conditions. Buyers get free delivery from PLN 49.90 per seller for subscriptions activated from 2 March 2026 (earlier: PLN 45 for lockers and points, PLN 65 for courier), with a delivery cost in the order of up to PLN 100. For sellers: sales quality at least "Neutral", invoices paid on time, the full Allegro Delivery package switched on, return terms with a Polish return address, and a correct buyer email passed to the carrier. Returns: Allegro pays the return shipping if the buyer files through the return form in the Allegro account, and the base Smart! delivery fee is refunded automatically as a discount (for example, on a PLN 100 order shipped to an InPost locker and fully returned, PLN 7.89 comes back). The commission on returned orders can be refunded as a transaction discount, on request within 45 days or automatically. Outside Smart! the buyer pays return shipping unless you agreed otherwise or did not inform them (Allegro help).

Allegro Buyer Protection (Allegro Ochrona Kupujących, formerly Allegro Protect) refunds buyers up to PLN 20,000. The seller deadlines are 14 days to answer a complaint, 2 days to refund after the buyer cancels, and 7 days from receiving a return to refund — shorter than the statutory 14 days under the Consumer Rights Act (ustawa o prawach konsumenta). If a deadline is missed, Allegro pays the buyer and charges the seller (Allegro help).

Extra fees (gross, from Allegro's fee page): a promotion costs PLN 19.90 for 10 days (PLN 5.90 for selected fashion and jewellery, PLN 2.90 for Culture & entertainment), a flexible one PLN 2.90 a day, plus an extra commission of "0.75 of the category commission"; Allegro Ads are CPC or CPM with a minimum CPC from PLN 0.10 (Real estate) to PLN 0.80 (Health, Business & services), a minimum CPM of PLN 9 and a minimum daily budget of PLN 3 (sponsored) or PLN 15 (display); the seller subscription per 30 days is Basic PLN 49, Professional PLN 199, Expert PLN 3,000; one Smart!Coin is worth PLN 1.23 gross. The fee page on help.allegro.com shows older numbers in places (for example 8 million Smart! subscribers), so use the investor releases for company figures.

Amazon.pl is the other marketplace Polish sellers weigh. Its selling plans are the Individual plan at PLN 4 net per unit sold and the Professional plan at PLN 165.91 net (excl. VAT) per month (sell.amazon.pl/oplaty); referral fees depend on the category, so check the current fee table for yours.

What one order actually costs: Allegro versus your own store

To show how differently the two channels add up, we worked through one order at three price points. This is an illustrative calculation, not a recommendation of either channel — your own category's commission and your own payment provider will change the real numbers (rates read between 30.09 and 1.10.2026).

Assumptions: a single dress (the Fashion category), one unit, delivery to an InPost locker. Allegro: the Smart! offer; the dress commission from the table effective 2.03.2026 (net) is 11.5% up to PLN 110 and above that PLN 12.65 plus 7.5% of the amount over PLN 110; the Smart! InPost fee is gross (Annex 4, art. 15.2); no promotion, ads or subscription. Own store: Przelewy24 at 1.29% + PLN 0.30 (price table); shipping with an InPost business locker size A at PLN 14.55 net + 13% fuel = PLN 16.44 net (inpost.pl/cenniki), with free delivery for the customer; no platform subscription or acquisition cost. We add the commission (net) and the Smart! fee (gross) as the sources give them.

• PLN 60 order. Allegro: 6.90 + 3.19 = PLN 10.09. Own store: 1.07 + 16.44 = PLN 17.51.
• PLN 150 order. Allegro: 15.65 + 9.99 = PLN 25.64. Own store: 2.24 + 16.44 = PLN 18.68.
• PLN 500 order. Allegro: 41.90 + 9.99 = PLN 51.89. Own store: 6.75 + 16.44 = PLN 23.19.

If the buyer pays for shipping, the own-store cost is the gateway fee only: PLN 1.07, 2.24 and 6.75.

The pattern: the marketplace fee is a percentage plus a per-parcel step, so it scales with price, while in your own store the payment cost barely moves and shipping stays a fixed line (see ecommerce shipping in Poland for that mechanism). What this calculation leaves out on purpose is a major cost difference between the two channels: customer acquisition. On Allegro the buyer is already there; in your own store, you have to bring them, through ads, SEO or email, and that cost depends entirely on your category and can't be estimated honestly without your own data. It also leaves out your platform subscription, covered separately in how much an ecommerce website costs, and payment-gateway specifics in payment gateway fees.

How Allegro API integration works

Whichever marketplace you connect to, the integration typically goes through a REST API: the same interface a ready-made connector app and a custom-built integration both use to list products, update stock and prices, pull in orders, and create shipments. Three mechanics come up in any such integration, and Allegro's public developer documentation gives a concrete example of each:

• Authorisation. Allegro's API offers four OAuth flows: Authorization Code (the standard flow for an app acting on a seller's behalf, with PKCE recommended), Device flow (for apps with no browser), Client Credentials (public data only, such as the category tree), and Dynamic Client Registration for software that installs itself on a seller's own server. An access token is valid for 12 hours; a one-time refresh token extends authorisation for up to 3 months, after which the seller has to log in again.
• Rate limits and sandbox. Allegro's main limit is 9,000 requests per minute per Client ID; exceeding it blocks that Client ID for a minute and returns a 429 error. A sandbox environment, with the same limit, lets you test an integration before it touches real listings and real orders.
• Ongoing maintenance. Marketplace APIs change, and some changes break existing integrations. Between 18 August and 2 September 2026, Allegro's developer news page announced four API changes, two of them marked as breaking: a delivery-price-list field removed on 29 September 2026, and phone numbers without a country prefix rejected by its shipping service from 1 October 2026. Whoever owns the integration — the connector vendor, or you — has to track changes like these continuously, not just at launch.

These specific numbers belong to Allegro. Amazon documents its own authorisation and rate-limit rules, so check those before you build against it. If you use a connector app from your platform's app store, this complexity is the vendor's problem, not yours; building your own integration means it becomes yours.

Integrators and platform integrations in Poland (net, read 30.09.2026): Base.com — Freemium PLN 0 (100 orders a month, 1,000 products), Business PLN 279 fixed + PLN 0.99 per order, Enterprise on request for more than 5,000 orders or PLN 1 million GMV a month (base.com); Sellasist — PLN 59 (up to 100 orders), 189 (101–500), 359 (501–1,000), 699 (1,001–5,000), 899 (5,001–10,000), and PLN 1,190 or 1,590 for the largest tier (sellasist.pl); Apilo — Starter PLN 39 (up to 100 orders), Basic 199 (up to 500), Professional 399 (up to 1,500), Optimum 799 (up to 5,000), Advanced 999 (up to 10,000), about 10% less annually (apilo.com). Sync frequency differs: Base Freemium hourly and Business in real time; Apilo Starter every 2 hours, higher plans hourly, with a paid live mode; Sellasist a maximum of 10 minutes; IdoSell every 10 minutes. Platforms: Shoper Standard has a "two-way Allegro integration" through Apilo Lite at PLN 0, up to 5,000 active offers, "up to 25 orders" (period not stated) and a sync every 4 hours, while real-time needs paid Apilo from PLN 39 net (shoper.pl/allegro); IdoSell has a built-in integration, and from 1.08.2026 a marketplace order fee of PLN 0.55, 0.49 or 0.42 net (Business, Expert+, Enterprise) (IdoSell help).

Stock sync and the overselling risk

Overselling happens when the last unit of a product is bought in two channels at once, before the integration has time to reduce the stock count in the other one. The risk scales with one number: the interval between syncs. The longer it is, the longer a marketplace listing keeps showing stock you no longer have.

Even a connector advertised as syncing "in real time" isn't instantaneous — Base's documentation says offers update "within a few minutes" and that large batches "may take many hours" (base.com); the integrator sync times above show how plan choice sets the interval. Three ways to cut the risk without necessarily paying for a faster plan:

• keep a buffer on the marketplace — list fewer units than you actually hold, especially for the last few;
• sell single-unit products through one channel only;
• confirm every listing is linked to an inventory record in your platform or connector, since syncing doesn't help a listing that was never tied to stock in the first place.

Remember what's on the other side of an oversold order: under a buyer-protection programme such as Allegro's, an order that is never shipped can mean the marketplace refunds the buyer and charges the amount to your account.

When to build your own integration

A ready-made connector is the right default for most stores: you pay a subscription, and the vendor absorbs API changes and rate limits. Building your own integration through the marketplace's API directly makes sense when:

• you run your own system — an ERP, a WMS, or a custom-built store — that no off-the-shelf connector supports, or supports only partially;
• you need logic no connector offers, such as custom pricing rules, stock reservation across warehouses, or splitting one order across multiple locations;
• a per-order fee grows faster than your margin — some connector plans charge per order, so work out at what order volume that cost overtakes the cost of maintaining your own code;
• you need a shorter sync interval than your current plan offers.

On the other side of that decision sit real, ongoing costs: registering an application and handling OAuth tokens, queuing requests under rate limits, testing in a sandbox, monitoring for errors, and — the part that never stops — adapting to API changes as the marketplace rolls them out. Allegro alone announced four API changes in about two weeks of August and September 2026. Treat a custom integration as an ongoing cost of doing business, not a one-off project; our ecommerce TCO calculator can help you weight it against everything else. If you're planning a store together with a marketplace channel from the start, estimate the launch cost in our online store cost calculator.

Five steps to deciding on marketplace integration

1. Check the commission for your exact category in Allegro's table, and any cap.
2. Run one order through both channels using your own numbers — commission, the Smart! fee or delivery commission, gateway fees, and shipping.
3. Decide on Smart! — the conditions, the full Allegro Delivery package, and free returns on Allegro's side.
4. Choose your integration method based on order volume and how fast you need stock to sync — the platform's built-in integration, an integrator, or your own API code.
5. Set your stock-sync rules — a buffer on the marketplace, single-unit items in one channel only, and every offer linked to stock.

The remaining cost of a single order — payment, shipping and returns — is covered in payments and logistics.