Allegro Lokalnie

From startup to full-blown profitable product

ongoing cooperation

Key insights and learnings

Finding ways to leverage a user base of the mother-service boosted growth

Workaround for initially limited marketing budgets: user retention and activation, and organic traffic

Free deliveries are a major incentive for C2C

The Client

Allegro, the biggest e‑commerce platform in Poland and one of most recognizable in Europe with almost 200 mln MAU, which exists for over 20 years. They wanted to overhaul the customer experience in the C2C segment. The idea was to maintain full B2C support in the Allegro platform and create a new one strictly for transactions between private customers — Allegro Lokalnie.

Allegro Lokalnie aimed to be the best place for casual merchants, providing a lightweight and tailor‑made process, streamlined selling experience along with providing competitive prices. And all of that under the Allegro umbrella — which meant customer safety built in the product DNA. These were key requirements that kickstarted our cooperation.

From the outset, Appunite's team demonstrated exceptional expertise and commitment. They seamlessly integrated into our development process, providing not just technical skills but also a sense of ownership over the project. This was crucial in fostering a collaborative environment where everyone felt invested in the product's success.

Jarosław Żmudziński

ex-CTO

Allegro Lokalnie

The main challenge

Allegro itself was focused on B2C relations, and aimed at putting the product at the center of the marketplace. At the same time, Allegro wanted to continue supporting sales and purchases in the C2C model, and launched a separate service — Allegro Lokalnie

The goal was to recapture a leading position in the C2C niche by focusing the Lokalnie platform on the purchases, building its organic visibility, and user retention.

Building traffic:
from startup to enterprise

Allegro Lokalnie initially operated as a startup within the broader Allegro ecosystem. We delivered the MVP to validate the business assumption that a dedicated C2C platform was something the market truly needed.

As the product matured, our next challenge was to strengthen its visibility and ensure sustainable traffic growth. In the early stages, we leveraged the synergy with the main Allegro platform — offers from Allegro Lokalnie appeared in search results on the primary marketplace, helping accelerate early adoption.

When Allegro's ecosystem naturally evolved and diversified its focus, Allegro Lokalnie began building its own independent traffic and visibility strategy. Together, we introduced several initiatives to boost organic reach, improve retention, and establish Lokalnie as a distinct yet fully integrated part of the Allegro environment.

Today, Allegro Lokalnie's growth journey mirrors the evolution from a startup's agility to the operational maturity of a Series C-level product within a large enterprise.

Optimizing marketing performance under budget constraints

At the early phases of the project, Allegro Lokalnie operated with limited marketing budgets. To ensure the product gets enough reach, we focused on two pivot points: retention and engagement of current users, and getting new ones through SEO.

Optimizing cloud costs

As the platform grew, we were asked to analyze the costs of all cloud services Lokalnie is using. It turned out that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) had the highest cost. Allegro Lokalnie made a decision to look into this part, and so we did it. By doing a series of technical tweaks, we were able to reduce the GCP costs by 80%. Read more here.

Attracting new users through organic traffic and SEO

Due to project constraints, organic traffic became a crucial growth channel. You can read here how we have contributed to product growth through technical SEO. We also systematically improved Core Web Vitals and implemented parallel website loading to reduce loading times. We optimized inactive offers indexing, integrated with Allegro's main SEO admin panel, and built dedicated SEO solutions to accelerate rank growth. The SEO‑compliant optimization of the main site header was also future‑proofed for monetization.

Building retention through free deliveries

Cost effectiveness is one of the key incentives for C2C transactions, so we explored ways to strengthen it. The main Allegro service already offered a popular free delivery program (Allegro Smart!), and extending this benefit to Allegro Lokalnie users became a natural next step.

Together with the Allegro team, we focused on finding a fast and scalable way to bring this feature to life. By adapting the technical solution from the main Allegro platform to the Lokalnie ecosystem, we delivered the first iteration of free deliveries in just three months.

Every two months, we reviewed the feature's performance and fine-tuned it further. The results confirmed that the initiative effectively boosted sales and user engagement. From the technical side, the solution required extensive integrations, so we built a dedicated microservice containing the full business logic — ready to support future delivery partners.

Cooperation testimonial

Working with Appunite on the Allegro Lokalnie project was a transformative experience. As the CTO responsible for building Allegro Lokalnie from scratch, I was initially faced with the challenge of creating a scalable, future‑proof platform that could handle a large user base without competing for resources with Allegro's main platform. Appunite proved to be an invaluable partner in this endeavor.
‍
From the outset, Appunite's team demonstrated exceptional expertise and commitment. They seamlessly integrated into our development process, providing not just technical skills but also a sense of ownership over the project. This was crucial in fostering a collaborative environment where everyone felt invested in the product's success.
‍
One of the standout aspects of our collaboration was Appunite's flexibility and responsiveness. Whether it was rapidly scaling the team to meet changing requirements or ensuring that we met tight deadlines, Appunite consistently delivered. Their ability to provide additional resources on short notice was particularly impressive and ensured that we could maintain our development pace without compromising quality.
‍
The decision to use Elixir as our technology stack, supported by Appunite's expertise, was pivotal. It allowed us to achieve remarkable performance and scalability, serving millions of users efficiently. The platform's architecture was designed to be adaptable, enabling us to pivot and implement innovative features like a chat‑based buyer‑seller interaction model.
‍
Overall, Appunite's dedication to our project went beyond typical client‑vendor relationships. Their proactive approach, combined with their technical prowess, played a significant role in the success of Allegro Lokalnie. I highly recommend Appunite to any organization seeking a reliable and innovative software development partner.