Who is where now? The personnel carousel of the Marketplace Universe has been moving merrily along in July. We help you keep up with the Movers & Shakers of our dynamic industry.

Our Movers & Shakers Top picks in July

Christina Skoerries leaves camel active and hands over the position of Director E-commerce EMEA to Melanie Vogt, formerly Head of E-Commerce at Bonita.

Pedro Bloch kicks off a new role as E-commerce Sales Manager at Huawei.

Patrick Kemtzian left Kaufland e-Commerce after four years and joined Redcare Pharmacy as Assoc. Director Retail Media Sales & Business Development.

Simone Rodenburg has made the leap from ChannelEngine to Hunkemöller, taking on the role of Global Marketplace Manager.

Luxury retail gains a new digital force: Wandrille Lefebvre has joined Louis Vuitton as Global Digital Business Growth & Traffic Director.

More Movers & Shakers in July

Faisal Ali has joined TikTok as Business Development Manager.

Adrian Burger has moved from Digitec Galaxus AG to Die Schweizerische Post, where he now works as Product Manager Retail.

Marko Chytka is moving from Heureka Group into the C-suite, joining Realpad as Chief Product Officer.

Sanne Duijsens has moved on from Taxdoo and joined Marosa as Marketing Director.

Maria Belén Escamilla has left Romux and joined Protege tu vida as Marketplace Manager.

Alexa Findeisen has been promoted to Senior Key-Account-Manager at CHANGE Lingerie.

Florian Gutsch was promoted to Vice President Revenue & Growth Channels at home24 SE.

Jordi Iborra Garrido has stepped up into a new role as Team Manager at Decathlon.

Irith Markens is taking on Director of Customer Success at ChannelMojo.

Tina Oswald has been promoted to Senior Product Marketplace Specialist at Tradebyte.

Sachita Patil is trading fashion e-commerce for consulting, leaving Zalando to join Accenture as Business Architecture Manager.

Ana Pérez Abellán has been promoted to Senior Marketing Manager at Amazon.

Hana Petrov has kicked off a new role as Consultant Marketplace at ChannelMojo.

Vera Schiffers has been promoted to Team Lead E-Commerce / Marketplace Management at DiCommerce.

Dietmar Sicking is diving into a new challenge as Business Development WEMALO & YouSellWeSend at WEMALO Cloud Software für Logistikdienstleister.

Simone Tidore has been promoted to Senior Ecommerce Consultant at Front Row Germany.

Omel Joshue Torribilla Nunes has joined Telcomdis as Marketplace Specialist.

Brian van Baak has been promoted to Manager IT Vendor Management at bol.

Anouck van Rietschoten has been promoted to Head of Commerce at Publicis Groupe NL.

Did we miss something? Let us know!

Der Beitrag Marketplace Movers & Shakers in July 2026 erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

Marketplaces in Poland 2026: Allegro’s Fortress, and the Line Forming at the Gate

Poland’s e-commerce market keeps growing — just not quite as fast as last year, and not evenly. According to ECDB, Polish e-commerce revenue reached €28.66 billion in 2025, up 10.9% year-over-year, with growth expected to ease slightly to 8.9% in 2026, taking the market to roughly €31.2 billion. The online share of total retail sits at 6.6% in 2025, essentially flat into 2026 — a reminder that despite the headlines, Poland’s shift online is still a gradual one compared to Western Europe.

Cross-border data underlines the point. 8.9% of Polish e-commerce revenue in 2025 went to purchases made abroad — and of that, 93.7% landed on Chinese stores. AliExpress, Temu and Shein aren’t peripheral players fighting for scraps; they’re the default answer to where Poles shop once they leave the domestic market.

Our freshly updated Marketplace Country Quadrant Poland 2026 reflects this market — but with a sharper edge than in previous years, and a clearer picture of which marketplaces in Poland actually deserve a seat at the table.

What’s Changed? Correcting for Distortion

The 2025 quadrant listed five names in the Generalists box. Looking at the data again, we don’t think that box should read as a genuine peer group at all.

Exits

• Empik drops out of the Generalists box. Not because it lost relevance, but because ranking it alongside Allegro overstated the competitive reality — it moves down into three specialist boxes instead: DIY & Garden, Sports and Beauty & Care.
• Morele exits DIY & Garden and Sports, remaining only in Electronics, after losing revenue across several categories in 2025.
• eBay exits Electronics. Its role in Polish electronics trade has become marginal.

New Entries

• Media-Expert enters Electronics. Poland’s most important electronics retailer launched its own third-party marketplace in autumn 2025.

Observations

Kaufland stays in the Generalists box. Launched in Poland in August 2024, it’s still small next to Allegro, but its growth story is real (+322% marketplace revenue year-over-year) and it offers Western sellers a less crowded entry point than Allegro.

Vinted does not appear in this year’s chart. By ECDB’s estimate, it’s the second-largest fashion platform in Poland by GMV, beaten only by Zalando. It stays out of the visual chart for the same structural reason as last year — our methodology centres on B2C marketplaces with professional seller relevance, and Vinted’s core model remains peer-to-peer resale — but a platform doing this much volume deserves this mention.

Douglas is not in the Beauty & Care box. It has a real offline retail footprint in Poland and runs a Mirakl-powered partner marketplace in several European markets, but we can’t confirm meaningful third-party volume specifically in Poland — so for now it’s a relevant retailer, not a marketplace entry.

The Most Important Marketplaces in Poland: The 2026 Quadrant in Detail

Generalists

• Allegro: Still the undisputed anchor of Polish e-commerce, and still the platform every other name on this list is measured against.
• Amazon: The clearest international generalist presence, though still a distant second to Allegro on home turf.
• AliExpress & Temu: The Chinese pairing that dominates the price-driven end of the market — and the direct beneficiaries of Poland’s outsized appetite for cross-border shopping abroad.
• Kaufland: The newest name in the box — small next to Allegro, but growing fast and a genuinely easier entry point for Western sellers.

Specialists by Category

• Fashion & Shoes: Zalando leads on brand-driven positioning; Shein anchors the price-driven end; Polish player Modivo and its second retail destination eobuwie.pl fill up the chart.
• Electronics: Morele holds its ground; MediaMarkt remains a solid brand-driven presence; Media-Expert enters fresh off its autumn 2025 marketplace launch.
• Home & Living: Black Red White and Leroy Merlin anchor the category locally, with Shein continuing its push into home goods.
• DIY & Garden: Leroy Merlin and Castorama remain the category’s backbone, joined now by Empik, whose marketplace does real volume in home and garden products.
• Sports: Decathlon and Zalando cover the category’s poles, with Empik’s expanding third-party sports assortment earning it the third spot.
• Beauty & Care: Zalando and Shein continue to push into beauty, with Empik rounding out the box — Douglas, despite its retail strength, doesn’t clear the bar on confirmed marketplace volume in Poland.

The Line Is Forming: Who’s Circling Poland

Poland’s Unique Market Dynamics

Poland spent years being treated as a market with strong local roots and limited room for outsiders. That read is now out of date. Within roughly two years, a wave of players — foreign and domestic — have either launched or announced marketplaces here, and the pattern only makes sense as what it is: the fight for the Polish consumer is now fully on.

Already live, all launched in the past 12–24 months:

Kaufland’s marketplace went live in August 2024, Castorama’s followed in January 2025, and MediaMarkt’s in May 2025 — three retailers from three different categories, each converting a closed retail operation into a third-party platform within roughly a year of each other. None of these launches happened in isolation; they’re the leading edge of the same trend the newer arrivals below are now riding. 

Not yet in the chart, but moving fast:

TikTok Shop launched in Poland on 15 June 2026, backed by InPost for logistics and BLIK for payments. It’s too early to say what this does to the category landscape — a few weeks of live data tells us nothing about whether social commerce reallocates Polish spending or just adds a channel on top. We may well be adding TikTok Shop to next year’s Generalists box.

About You launched its own marketplace in Poland in June 2026, opening with roughly 600 brands and 100,000 additional products on aboutyou.pl — Zalando diversifying its Polish exposure across two brands instead of one.

easyShop, the marketplace easyGroup is building with OnBuy, is set to launch across 21 European countries — Poland included — later in 2026. Nothing live yet, but a pure-marketplace model launching across that many markets simultaneously is not a small commitment.

The local Pushback:

Media-Expert’s own marketplace launch in autumn 2025 sits apart from this group — as Poland’s largest domestic electronics retailer, its move reads less like an outsider chasing the Polish market and more like a domestic incumbent defending its turf against exactly the kind of external pressure described here.

InPost Buy, live since March 2026 and still in its zero-commission welcome phase (through September 2026), isn’t a marketplace in the classical sense — founded by the biggest Polish logistics provider InPost, it offers no buy box and no seller commission, but focuses solely on monetisation through delivery fees instead. Around 4,000 merchants are already connected, including Modivo.

Marketplace Universe Insight: Six companies launching or preparing marketplaces in the same market within two years is not a coincidence. Poland has been identified as one of Europe’s more attractive growth opportunities precisely because it isn’t already crowded with generalists the way Germany or the UK are. Allegro’s dominance has, paradoxically, kept the field open.

Conclusion

The honest read on Poland in 2026 is that the market looks stable mostly because the challengers haven’t landed yet. Allegro’s position is not under real pressure today — but a market where TikTok Shop, About You, Castorama and MediaMarkt all show up within the same year is not a market anyone should assume stays quiet for long. For brands and sellers, the practical takeaway is this: the entry points for Poland are multiplying, and several of them (Kaufland, InPost Buy) offer meaningfully less competitive shelf space than fighting for visibility on Allegro directly. Whether that’s still true in twelve months is a different question — and one we intend to keep asking.

Key Learnings

• Allegro’s dominance is not up for debate in 2026 — but its scale is precisely why we no longer treat five or six platforms as comparable “generalists.” A market this concentrated needs a chart that reflects the concentration.
• Cross-border spending is a Chinese story, full stop. 93.7% of what Poles spend abroad goes to Chinese stores — AliExpress, Temu and Shein aren’t fighting for scraps, they’re the default exit route from the domestic market.
• Watch the platforms outside the chart as closely as the ones inside it. Vinted’s GMV already outranks most listed Fashion & Shoes players; Douglas has the retail footprint but not (yet) the confirmed marketplace volume in Poland.
• Poland is no longer flying under the radar. Kaufland, Castorama and MediaMarkt all converted retail operations into marketplaces within a 12-month window — and TikTok Shop, About You, easyShop and InPost Buy have all made moves since, some live, some still ahead.
• Not every domestic marketplace launch is about growth ambition. Media-Expert’s move looks more like defense against external pressure than expansion for its own sake — a distinction worth keeping in mind as more incumbents follow suit.
• For brands weighing market entry, the timing question has changed. A year ago, Poland meant Allegro or nothing. Today there are genuinely easier, less crowded entry points — but that window won’t stay open indefinitely if this pace of new launches continues.

Want to add your voice?

Did we miss an emerging player in our analysis of marketplaces in Poland? Help us make the quadrant even more precise for 2027!

Visit our Quadrants Main Page to explore category-based and country-based analyses.

Do you have anything to add to our country quadrant for Poland? Let us know!

Der Beitrag Top Marketplaces in Poland – Marketplace Country Quadrant Poland 2026 erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

The Loss Nobody Should Be Talking About

Three years, two failed listing attempts, and 463 pages later, Shein finally put real numbers on the table. On July 26, the fast-fashion group filed its draft Hong Kong IPO prospectus, targeting a $40-50 billion valuation – down from $98.2 billion at its 2022 peak.

The headline that traveled fastest: a $99 million net loss in Q1 2026, versus a $395 million profit a year earlier.

It’s also the headline that matters least. Several industry analysts who read the filing line by line independently arrived at the same read: the loss is a non-cash accounting effect from a fair-value adjustment on convertible preferred shares ahead of listing. Strip that line out, and the quarter was operationally profitable.

As China Commerce expert Ed Sander put it: “the net loss was caused by devaluation of shares, not bad business.”

What the Loss Is Hiding: A Shrinking Basket and a Growing Marketplace

The number that deserved the headline barely made most coverage: revenue growth collapsed from 41% (2023) to 21% (2024) to 8% (2025) – and to just 1.1% in Q1 2026.

Behind that deceleration sits a quieter shift. Active customers and total orders kept climbing every year; revenue didn’t keep pace. Divide net revenue by orders, and average order value has fallen for three straight years.

The Numbers Behind the Squeeze:

Purchase frequency is stable. Customers aren’t leaving and aren’t buying less often–  they’re spending less per order, three years running. Source: Shein’s Hong Kong IPO prospectus

This is the pattern Ed Sander flagged first: loyalty holds, but each visit brings home less value. Given Shein had to raise some US prices after the de minimis exemption disappeared, a rising AOV would have been the expected response. Instead it kept falling – the clearest sign yet that Shein is losing wallet share elsewhere, right as its own costs climb.

But behind this interesting number hides another one. Shein’s own filing explains that a marketplace order only shows up in revenue as a commission, not as the full price the customer paid – so as more orders shift to the marketplace model, average revenue per order mechanically falls even if customers are spending exactly the same. The AOV drop is real, but it’s a mix of shoppers trading down and Shein simply booking less of each marketplace sale as its own revenue. We’ll come back to that further down.

Shein Blames Tariffs. The Timeline Says Otherwise.

Shein’s own prospectus points to trade policy as the central threat: the end of the US de minimis exemption in May 2025, and the EU’s removal of its €150 duty-free threshold plus a new €3 handling fee. Most coverage has followed that framing.

But the timeline doesn’t cooperate. Operating margin was 4.3% in 2023, dropped sharply to 2.5% in 2024. That’s a full year before any tariff changed – then recovered to 4.1% in 2025, the year the US shock actually landed. If tariffs were the main wound, the dates run backwards.

The analysts of Momentum Works, who have read the full filing, points to a different 2024 event instead: Temu overtook Shein in estimated global GMV that year, competing for the same scarce inputs – consumer wallet share, ad inventory on Meta and Google, third-party air freight out of southern China, and warehouse capacity abroad. That’s a fight over resources, not a customs bill.

“That, not the tariff headlines, is the clock worth watching,” Momentum Works wrote of the pressure building since 2024.

German e-commerce analyst Alexander Graf’s read lands close to the same place, though with a different conclusion: he still sees the underlying model as sound. “Peak Shein is far from reached,” he argued in his own breakdown of the filing – pointing to Shein’s ability to – offset a shrinking US share elsewhere, and to the fast-growing, higher-margin marketplace business as the real story the deceleration obscures.

Europe Is Where the Next Round Gets Decided

Europe isn’t just catching up to the US shock – it’s already Shein’s bigger Western market, and has been since before the shock even started. In every single reported period, Europe’s revenue has outpaced the US: $10.2 billion versus $9.5 billion in 2023, widening to $14.8 billion versus $10.1 billion by 2025 – a lead of roughly 46%. Even in Q1 2026, Europe held a $2.9 billion to $2.0 billion advantage. That reframes the whole EU tariff story: this isn’t regulation catching up with a secondary market, it’s hitting the region that already generates more Shein revenue than the United States does. 

The bloc removed its €150 duty-free threshold and introduced a €3 handling fee on July 1, 2026 – weeks before this prospectus was filed. Shein itself flags that the European impact could match or exceed what it saw in the US.

Unlike in the US, Shein’s European warehouse footprint has centered on a single major hub in Belgium – a thinner buffer than the multi-site US network. But Shein isn’t starting from zero: it has already opened a Polish logistics hub this year, built explicitly to support local marketplace sellers, and is recruiting third-party retailers across the continent – more than  600 in Germany alone, plus a partnership with the Madrid Chamber of Commerce to bring Spanish businesses onto the platform. The US playbook – localize, clear in bulk, absorb the shock through infrastructure rather than price alone – is being rolled out in Europe in parallel with the new fee, not after it.

Shein’s Marketplace Is the Real Growth Engine Now 

Between the loss headline and the tariff story, the actual pivot in this prospectus goes almost unmentioned: service revenue – Shein’s cut from third-party marketplace sellers and its Xcelerator brand program – has grown from 2.7% of net revenue in 2023 to 14.3% by early 2026.

That means: Shein’s marketplace is also already bigger than most people assume. The filing discloses that marketplace commissions generally run 10% to 20% of transaction value. Even after setting aside a meaningful chunk of that $4.7 billion service-revenue line for fulfillment fees rather than pure commission, and applying Shein’s own disclosed rate to what’s left, a conservative estimate puts marketplace GMV somewhere between $20 billion and $30 billion for 2025 alone – equivalent to more than 60% of the size of Shein’s entire $37.1 billion product business. Shein doesn’t publish that GMV figure itself, which, in a filing that discloses almost everything else, is a choice worth noting.

Marketplace Universe Insight: Shein doesn’t disclose marketplace margin directly, but the direction is clear: brand-enablement and service revenue reportedly runs at roughly double the group’s overall operating margin, since Shein collects a commission without carrying inventory risk. An Xcelerator partner brand, per the filing, can grow revenue 15-fold in its second year on the platform while lifting its own operating margin by more than 30 percentage points. Partner brands already on board include Everlane and Missguided; in Germany alone, Shein counts more than 600 local sales partners.

That’s the quiet logic behind the German seller drive and the Polish logistics hub: every local retailer Shein signs up adds revenue without adding a unit to its own cost-of-sales line.

Our Take: Shein’s Marketplace Is Already the Story 

Reading this prospectus as a referendum on whether Shein is in trouble misses the more useful question. The growth numbers are weak – a business decelerating from +41% to roughly +1% in three years doesn’t get to wave that away, IPO bookkeeping effects or not. But the number that matters most isn’t in any headline: Shein’s marketplace, on our own conservative estimate, already moves $20–30 billion in GMV – more than 60% the size of its entire product business, and a figure Shein doesn’t publish itself. That’s not a side project anymore. That’s close to a second Shein, running quietly inside the first one.

This is also the real answer to the tariff question. The pressure isn’t customs officers – it’s Temu, and it started a year before anyone blamed a tariff. Shein can’t out-cheap Temu in the segment that made it famous, and its own numbers show it isn’t trying to: the fastest-growing, best-margin part of the business is the marketplace, and it’s already large enough to matter more than the core catalog’s next percentage point of growth. Expect Shein to push upmarket into mid-price territory less through its own product line and more by recruiting the local retailers who already own that positioning – in Germany, in Spain, and wherever else in Europe.

So what we see here is a marketplace that’s already bigger than most of the industry assumed, quietly built and about to get a lot more visible. The fight for European retail’s middle ground won’t be won with cheaper t-shirts. It’ll be won with sign-up forms for local sellers – and Shein is already ahead on collecting them.

Key Learnings

• The Shein IPO’s Q1 2026 net loss is a non-cash accounting artefact tied to preferred-share revaluation, not operational distress – but the growth deceleration to 1.1% is real.
• Average order value has fallen for three consecutive years (~$45 to ~$39) while purchase frequency stayed flat – shrinking wallet share, but partly a bookkeeping effect of the marketplace model too.
• The timing of the 2024 margin squeeze, before any tariff change, points to Temu as the more likely root cause than the trade policy Shein cites in its own filing.
• Europe’s version of the US shock is only weeks old; Shein is already building matching infrastructure and recruiting local sellers rather than waiting to react.
• Service and marketplace revenue, not the core fashion business, is Shein’s fastest-growing, highest-margin segment – up from 2.7% to 14.3% of net revenue in three years.
• Back-calculated from Shein’s own disclosed commission range, marketplace GMV is conservatively in the $20–30 billion range for 2025 – already more than 60% the size of Shein’s own product business, and a figure Shein itself doesn’t publish.
• The next competitive battle in European fast fashion is likely to be fought over local seller partnerships, not price.

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Der Beitrag Shein Marketplace: The Business Hiding Inside the IPO Numbers erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

Meta Takes Aim at eBay With New Facebook Marketplace Seller App
Meta has launched a dedicated Seller App for Facebook Marketplace alongside Facebook Verified, a free trust badge for authentic profiles – a clear step toward professionalising a platform long seen as a place for informal, local sales. The app targets margin-conscious power sellers who form the core of eBay‘s business. And while eBay charges 13-15% commission plus fixed fees, Meta monetises through its ad network instead – a considerably cheaper environment for resellers. See more on Goldesel and Yahoo Finance 

More News

The European Commission has fined AliExpress €550 million – the largest penalty ever issued under the Digital Services Act. The charge: the platform failed to adequately control counterfeit and unsafe products. That surpasses the previous DSA fine against fellow marketplace Temu (€200m) by a wide margin. Read more on Retail Gazette

Zalando Puts AI Into the Warehouse, Not the Chatbot
Zalando is joining Stuttgart robotics firm Sereact as a strategic investor. Sereact’s AI software enables robots to respond flexibly to different products and packaging – for instance in returns processing. Unlike most retail AI announcements, this investment targets not the customer interface but the margin directly. Get more details on Luzern.co

About You Launches AI Photo Studio Tayla
About You and Scayle are now marketing Tayla, an in-house AI photo studio, as a standalone SaaS product. It generates product images for shops, social media and campaigns in minutes rather than weeks, at up to 90% lower cost, according to About You. The solution already counts more than 100 customers. Find out more on Fashion Network

YouTube Launches Shopping Affiliate Programme in the UK
YouTube is launching its Shopping Affiliate Programme in the UK: creators in the YouTube Partner Program can now earn commission on products they promote, while retailers gain a new sales channel through creator reach. Launch partners already include M&S, Boots, Currys, Next, Debenhams, Wayfair and Etsy. See more on ChannelX

Consumer Association Takes Action Against Bol and Amazon
The Dutch Consumentenbond has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Amazon and bol, demanding they stop offering misleading discounts. Of 1,142 tracked products with World Cup discounts, nearly one in three was miscalculated. Pressure from the association has already prompted changes at Coolblue and Wehkamp – and it warns legal action could follow here too if compliance fails. Read more on Ecommerce News 

War News

Drone War Reaches Russia’s Largest Online Retailer
Ukrainian drones have repeatedly struck Wildberries warehouses since mid-July – Russia’s largest online marketplace. Wildberries says more than 10% of its logistics capacity has been affected, and several attacks have killed employees. Ukraine says the strikes target the supply of drone components through the warehouses; the EU had shortly before sanctioned Wildberries’ banking arm over its financial contribution to the Russian state budget. Find out more on NBC News

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Der Beitrag Marketplace Universe News 27.07.2026 – Meta’s frontal attack on eBay, and About You launches AI photo studio erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

More Than Nostalgia: What Counts as a Collectible

“Collectibles” is a wide umbrella. Grand View Research puts the global market at $320.3 billion in 2025, growing to $335.7 billion in 2026 — though estimates vary considerably by research firm, with some putting the figure closer to $600 billion depending on category definitions. ECDB tracks a much narrower slice of this under “Collectibles, Model Kits and Drones” within its Hobby & Leisure category, putting global online sales at $18.4 billion in 2025 — a reminder that even the data sources don’t slice this category the same way; ECDB’s figure also folds in model kits and drones, which aren’t really collectibles at all. 

Only 15–20% of that category is estimated to happen online, with the rest still moving offline through conventions, dealers, and in-person trading — one more sign that collectibles behave differently from the rest of retail. Europe accounts for over 37% of that global revenue, and Germany specifically is forecast to post some of the region’s highest growth rates. 

What actually falls under the umbrella:

• Trading cards — sports cards, Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and other trading card games (TCGs)
• Sneakers and streetwear
• Watches — vintage and modern luxury timepieces
• Handbags and luxury accessories
• Coins, banknotes, and medals
• Stamps (philately)
• Toys and figurines — LEGO, designer toys, Funko Pop, vintage action figures
• Vinyl records and other physical media
• Art and antiques — the single largest revenue category globally, at roughly a third of the total market

Two things distinguish this category from ordinary retail. First, condition is often self-reported and category-specific rather than standardised. A record graded “Very Good Plus” and a trading card graded “PSA 10” measure completely different things: PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) is a third-party grading company that scores cards from 1 to 10 based on centring, corners, edges and surface, with 10 being the rarest, cleanest grade — and its certificate is what buyers are actually paying for, not just the card itself. Second, the same object can be worth wildly different amounts depending on rarity, provenance and market timing, which is exactly why authentication becomes a structural problem rather than a nice-to-have.

There’s also a reason this category behaves so differently from the rest of retail: very little of it is bought to be used. A vintage handbag might never leave its dust bag, a sealed booster box might never be opened, a first-pressing record might never touch a turntable. The value lives in scarcity, condition and story rather than function, which is precisely why buyers care so much about who’s vouching for authenticity — there’s no way to “just try it and see” the way you would with a jumper or a kettle. Much of this behaviour is adults reconnecting with childhood rather than acquiring something new — an industry trend often shorthanded as “kidults” — which is why Pokémon, LEGO, and vintage toys keep outperforming categories with no personal history attached to them.

From Pocket Change to Five Figures: The Price Spectrum

Real sales illustrate the range better than any table could:

• At the low end: cards from the so-called “junk wax era” of 1986–1994, when manufacturers like Topps and Fleer printed baseball cards by the hundreds of millions. Decades later, most of them sell for a few cents to a couple of euros each — proof that age alone doesn’t create value, only scarcity does.
• At the other end of the same category: Goldin, eBay’s auction arm, sold a signed 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card for $2.7 million in October 2025, the highest price ever paid for a trading card.
• Ordinary vinyl records follow the same pattern — the bulk of Discogs’ catalogue, which drives over $500 million in annual sales, consists of common pressings trading for a few euros, not rarities.
• Memorabilia can swing just as wide: Catawiki sold a 1962 Tintin album, signed by both Hergé and several Apollo astronauts, for €71,000 in September 2025, and currently has a Pokémon World Championship trophy card in auction estimated above €50,000.
• Watches sit almost entirely at the upper end: Chrono24’s own records include a Richard Mille RM 052 — a skull-shaped tourbillon — which sold for $800,000.

The spread matters strategically: a marketplace built around €5 stamp trades doesn’t need the same trust infrastructure as one selling €2,000 watches. That’s the thread the rest of this piece pulls on.

It’s also worth being explicit about why the top end of that range exists at all. A growing share of collectibles buyers aren’t purchasing to enjoy the object day to day — they’re treating it as an alternative asset, the same logic that applies to art or classic cars. A sealed trading card box or a rare vintage watch can gain value faster than more conventional investments in the right market window, and that reframes what a marketplace needs to provide: not just “does this work”, but “will this hold or gain value, and can I prove what I actually own.” That’s a fundamentally different promise than most e-commerce categories are built to make.

Marketplace Universe Insight: Once an object is being bought as an investment rather than a purchase, the marketplace’s job quietly shifts from facilitating a sale to underwriting a claim about value. That’s a much bigger promise than “item as described” — and it’s why collectibles carry more trust infrastructure than almost any other retail category.

The Players: Who Actually Sells Collectibles Online

No single platform owns this category. It’s split across generalists, category specialists, and niche community platforms, each operating at a different scale.

eBay is the largest generalist touching collectibles in Europe. ECDB puts its 2025 GMV at €67.9 billion, with Hobby & Leisure — the category umbrella that includes collectibles — as its single largest segment at roughly 26% of sales. On eBay’s Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO Jamie Iannone named trading cards as the largest contributor to that quarter’s GMV growth, boosted by Pokémon’s 30th anniversary.

Catawiki, the Amsterdam-based curated auction platform, reported €771.5 million in GMV for 2025 per ECDB, growing 8.1% that year but decelerating to a forecast 5.4% in 2026. Its own reported revenue — the commission it actually keeps — was €105.4 million in 2024, a useful reminder that GMV and revenue are very different numbers for a marketplace.

Chrono24, the Karlsruhe-based watch specialist, lists over 600,000 watches from more than 3,000 professional dealers and 30,000 private sellers.

Vestiaire Collective, the Paris-based luxury fashion resale platform, generated $525 million in 2025 revenue per ECDB, and just extended its authenticated inventory into Zalando’s checkout across 14 European markets in May 2026 — a sign that authenticated resale is becoming a distribution feature for mainstream retailers, not just a marketplace niche.

Cardmarket, based in Berlin, is Europe’s largest trading card marketplace: a fixed-price catalogue (no auctions) with roughly 500,000 users and 100 million listed offers, charging a flat 5% seller commission.

A handful of specialist platforms round out the picture. Discogs handles vinyl records and physical media, with over $500 million in annual sales. BrickLink covers LEGO parts and sets, and has been owned by the LEGO Group itself since 2019. Delcampe specialises in stamps, coins, banknotes and postcards. StockX covers sneakers and is now expanding into a looser “Listings” format. And local classifieds platforms like Shpock and Kleinanzeigen carry plenty of collectibles too, just without any dedicated trust infrastructure behind them.

One newer model is worth a brief mention: Timeless, a Berlin startup, buys the physical collectible itself — a watch, a classic car, a rare bottle — and sells tokenised fractional shares in it. That sidesteps the peer-to-peer trust question entirely, since the object is authenticated once, centrally, before anyone else touches it.

Selling Live: Why Collectibles Took to Livestreaming First

Live shopping has found a more natural home in collectibles than almost anywhere else in e-commerce. A seller can show condition on camera, flip a card under different light, or answer a question in real time — the kind of reassurance a static photo just can’t give, especially for buyers who’ve been burned by a misleading listing before.

Whatnot built its entire business on this format and reached roughly $8 billion in 2025 sales doing it, mostly through live sports card breaks, Pokémon auctions, and sneaker drops. eBay has followed the same logic with eBay Live (see our deep dive on eBay Live), folding livestreamed selling directly into its core marketplace rather than building a separate platform. StockX is taking the same route with StockX Live, rolling out later in 2026 — a signal that livestreaming is becoming a standard distribution format for this category specifically, not just a Whatnot niche.

Trust Is the Product: What Collectibles Demand From a Marketplace

This is where collectibles differ from almost every other retail category: the word “authenticated” means something different depending on which marketplace uses it, and none of the definitions is a legal guarantee of genuineness.

The clearest way to see this is as a spectrum rather than a checklist:

It’s worth distinguishing between payment protection and authentication here: Kleinanzeigen’s “Sicher bezahlen” escrow guards against fraud and non-delivery, but nobody checks whether the item itself is genuine — a meaningfully different promise from Cardmarket’s escrow-plus-catalogue model, let alone eBay’s physical inspection.

Catawiki’s expert-curation promise is currently under the most scrutiny of any model on this list. A 2025 investigation by Dutch broadcaster EenVandaag reviewed 170 of Catawiki’s self-described experts and found 60 with questionable credentials; Dutch consumer group Consumentenbond argued the platform may fall short of its EU Digital Services Act obligations to act on misleading listings.

“At Catawiki, quality and reliability come first. We combine technology with hundreds of in-house experts who assess every item before it’s listed on the site.”
— Catawiki, in a written response to EenVandaag, as reported by ArtDependence

Catawiki’s own terms already state it cannot guarantee an item’s legitimacy — responsibility ultimately sits with the seller.

Marketplace Universe Insight: Where a category sits on this spectrum isn’t arbitrary. Trading cards and vinyl lean on self-graded condition because forgery risk is comparatively low; watches and handbags get hub inspection or dealer certification because counterfeiting is lucrative and hard to catch without expertise.

This spectrum isn’t static, either. Two platforms are moving in opposite directions right now:

• StockX just loosened its own model, launching “Listings” for used sneakers and vintage apparel where verification is optional rather than default.
• Vestiaire Collective, in the same window, extended its hub-authentication model into Zalando’s mainstream checkout.

Worth watching — though it’s a separate story from the trust question itself.

Grading: The Authentication Layer That Lives Outside the Marketplace

Not all authentication happens on a marketplace at all. A whole industry of independent grading companies sits between collector and platform, and its certificates carry weight everywhere, not just on one site.

For trading cards, the names that matter are PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator, the market leader since 1991), BGS (Beckett Grading Services, known for detailed subgrades), CGC (Certified Guaranty Company, originally a comics grader, now dominant in Pokémon), and SGC, particularly strong for vintage cards and increasingly popular in Europe. Coins go to NGC or PCGS; comics go to CGC as well.

The process is the same everywhere: a collector sends the raw item in, an expert examines it against fixed criteria — for cards, that’s centring, corners, edges and surface — and assigns a numeric grade, typically on a 1-to-10 scale, with a perfect “Gem Mint 10” at the top. The item is then sealed in a tamper-evident case with the grade printed on the label. Turnaround runs from weeks to several months depending on how much is paid, and backlogs during hype cycles are common.

This is structurally different from marketplace-run authentication. Catawiki’s experts and Chrono24’s dealer network authenticate an item at the point of sale, for that one transaction. A PSA or CGC grade is portable — it travels with the card across eBay, Cardmarket, or Whatnot, and the certificate itself becomes part of what’s being priced. That’s also why eBay partners with PSA for its Authenticity Guarantee on trading cards rather than building its own grading operation: it’s borrowing an already-trusted credential instead of creating a new one.

A newer layer is starting to sit alongside human grading rather than replace it: eBay’s sneaker authentication issues a physical NFC tag on verified pairs, scannable by phone to confirm the item passed inspection — a small step toward blockchain-style, tamper-proof physical certificates that could eventually extend to other categories.

Key Learnings

• Collectibles span an unusually wide price range within a single category label — from a €0.05 overproduced trading card to an €800,000 watch — which is exactly why one-size-fits-all trust infrastructure doesn’t work.
• A significant share of high-value collectibles are bought as investments rather than for use, which changes what a marketplace is actually promising a buyer.
• Market-size estimates vary substantially by source and methodology — from roughly $18 billion (ECDB’s narrower category) to over $600 billion (the broadest industry definitions); treat any single headline figure as directional.
• “Authenticated” is not one standard. eBay, Catawiki, Chrono24, Cardmarket and Delcampe each define and enforce it differently — and the difference is structural, not marketing.
• Payment protection and item authentication are not the same thing: Kleinanzeigen’s buyer protection guards against fraud, not fakes.
• A large independent grading industry (PSA, CGC, BGS, SGC) sits outside any single marketplace, and its certificates often matter more to resale value than which platform the item is listed on.
• Catawiki’s curation-as-product model is currently facing real regulatory and journalistic scrutiny in the Netherlands, tied to EU Digital Services Act obligations.
• The spectrum is moving, not fixed: StockX is loosening its verification model in the same months Vestiaire Collective is extending its authentication into mainstream retail.

23.07.2026 – Written by Ricarda Eichler, Journalist and Author for OHN

Der Beitrag From Pokémon Cards to Rolexes: The Real Rules of Selling Collectibles Online erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

Temu Ramps Up Brand Protection
Temu is expanding its brand protection program, pledging to monitor more than 15,000 brands, tighten seller vetting, and proactively remove problematic listings. The move comes as the marketplace faces mounting regulatory pressure across Europe over counterfeits and product safety. Whether the new controls actually win back the trust of brands and regulators will depend on enforcement, not the announcement itself. See more on Retail-News

More News

Allegro’s International Business Jumps 82.4%
Allegro released preliminary Q2 figures ahead of its planned share buyback. Gross merchandise value in Poland rose 12%, while its international segment surged 82.4%. Group growth accelerated to 14.4%, with adjusted EBITDA up 16.9%. Read more on Wiadomoscihandlowe

Etsy’s Buyer Base Grows First Time in Two Years
Etsy‘s active buyer count rose 0.1% to 86.6 million in Q1 2026, marking its first increase in two years. Etsy is now reinvesting in seller tools after years of pulling back – a bet on sustaining the rebound. Find out more on Novadata

UK Clears eBay’s Depop Acquisition
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has cleared eBay‘s $1.2 billion acquisition of resale platform Depop, ruling out a Phase 2 investigation. Seller Etsy takes roughly $425 million less than it paid for Depop in 2021. With the acquisition eBay strengthens its fashion and Gen Z positioning. See more on BreakingTheNews 

CDON Bets Fully on Pure 3P Model
CDON posted 13% GMV growth in Q2 – its fifth consecutive quarter of positive growth – but take rate slipped to 17.6% from 18.4%. The marketing spend rose to 9.3% of GMV from 8%. EBITDA turned negative at -7.3 million SEK as the company fully phased out its loss-making 1P business, going all-in on a pure marketplace model. Get more details on Finance Yahoo

Final News

Rakuten France Confirms the End

Rakuten has confirmed the permanent closure of its French marketplace by the end of 2026 after failing to find a buyer. The shutdown affects 180 employees and closes the book on one of France’s e-commerce pioneers, live since 1997, formerly as Priceminister. See the full story on Thesiteoueb

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Der Beitrag Marketplace Universe News 20.07.2026 – Temu’s fight against counterfeits, and JoyBuy’s Amazon ambitions erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

What TikTok Shop Is — and Why It Isn’t Just Another Marketplace

Picture a creator unboxing a moisturiser on camera. She shows the texture on the back of her hand, explains why it suits oily skin, answers a comment or two. A small product tag sits in the corner of the video the whole time; tap it, and the product page, cart, checkout and payment open inside the app — no redirect, no separate marketplace to visit. The viewer never set out to buy a moisturiser. They were watching, and the shop came to them.

That is TikTok Shop: commerce built into the content people already open TikTok for. Products live inside short videos and LIVE sessions, are promoted by an affiliate ecosystem of creators, and sit in a Shop Tab that acts as an always-on storefront. All the machinery of a marketplace runs behind it — listings, orders, payouts, fulfillment, returns — but the way a customer reaches a product is what makes it different.

The scale is easy to underestimate. Every month, 200 million people across Europe open TikTok, according to TikTok’s newsroom. Since the EU launches in late 2024 and early 2025, more than 100,000 businesses have joined TikTok Shop across its first five markets — France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Ireland — with over 200,000 more in the older UK market. Daily gross merchandise value across those EU markets grew triple digits between August 2025 and February 2026.

What sets it apart is what happens before the sale.

Discovery Runs on Content, Not Search

On a classic search-based marketplace, the product detail page and the search ranking are the whole game. The customer already wants a cordless drill; your job is to be the drill they find and trust. The intent exists before you do.

TikTok Shop inverts that. Demand is created in the feed rather than captured at a search box. The Shop Tab gives shoppers somewhere to browse with intent, but it complements the content engine rather than replacing it. As Max Burianek, Head of TikTok Shop Germany, put it on the Let’s Talk Marketplace podcast: “The reason users go to TikTok is that they love the content.”

That inversion trips up brands that carry a marketplace playbook across with them. On a search platform, a well-built listing does its job quietly: people who are already looking will find it, so “set it up and let it run” can work. On TikTok Shop there is no stream of searchers to catch. If nobody is making content — the brand, its creators, a live host — nothing surfaces the product, and it stays invisible. Demand here has to be generated continuously, not simply captured.

Marketplace Universe Insight: It is tempting to file TikTok Shop under “social experiment” and assume the rules are looser here. They are not. Underneath the videos and the creators sits a regulated EU marketplace: product safety under GPSR, Extended Producer Responsibility, VAT obligations, and a designated EU Responsible Person for non-food goods all apply exactly as they would on any other platform. The discovery model is new. The compliance obligations are the ones you already know.

Is TikTok Shop Right for Your Product?

The honest answer from the platform side is that it depends less on your category than most brands assume. Burianek’s consistent message is that success is driven more by how an organisation sets itself up and how fast it can act than by its vertical. Beauty led from the start — an easy category for before-and-after demonstration — but electronics has grown strongly despite higher order values, and nutrition and wider FMCG are catching up.

The brand types that work are varied too — from social-native names that grew up on the platform to established consumer brands and FMCG players using the channel as a launch laboratory. The common thread is less the product itself than the willingness to build for content.

A useful gut check comes from the platform’s own “hero product” logic: can a customer grasp why they need this within a few seconds of seeing it? If the benefit is visual and quick to read, it has a strong chance in the feed; if it needs a spec sheet and a side-by-side comparison, it will be harder — though not impossible — to sell through content.

The Engine Room: How Selling Actually Happens

There is a myth that TikTok Shop is simply “the affiliate channel.” Affiliates matter enormously, but they are one part of a wider system. TikTok’s own newsroom describes three shopping surfaces: In-Feed Video and LIVE Shopping, where shoppers tap tagged products directly from videos and livestreams in the For You feed; the Product Showcase, where they browse and buy from a brand’s own profile; and the Shop Tab, a searchable product marketplace inside the app for shoppers who already have intent. The Shop Tab is the one surface that behaves like a conventional storefront; the other two run on content.

That content comes from two places. The first is the brand’s own — its own shoppable videos and its own LIVE sessions, with its own hosts. This is the brand speaking directly, and for higher-priced or more technical products it is often where the education happens. The second is the creator affiliate network: approved creators promote products in their own videos and earn a commission. Unlike traditional influencer marketing on flat fees, this is paid on performance — in effect hundreds of small campaigns, where you mainly pay for the ones that work. The brands that scale treat their creator pool almost like a CRM, briefing and supporting creators who often understand a product’s best angles better than the brand team does.

The tooling is moving the same way: automatic sample approval, rolled out across EU markets in January 2026, matches brands with creators by scoring them on past performance and product fit, so samples reach the creators most likely to convert.

Shopping ads sit on top of all of this, amplifying a brand’s own content or a creator’s video into more of the feed and buying visibility for lives when competition for attention peaks. Whichever mix a brand runs, a video can gather views and still sell nothing if the hook is weak or the listing does not convert — so the discipline is to read the whole funnel, not the view count alone.

What It Costs — and How Fulfillment Works

The headline cost is the commission: 9% on most categories, 7% on electronics, raised from an initial 5% in January 2026. Even after that increase it sits below the roughly 15% many classic marketplaces charge — worth holding onto, because the platform fee is not where the real money goes.

Beyond commission, the cost base depends on strategy. Affiliate commissions are sales-based; advertising is bought on an ROI basis; and content production, agencies and creator samples are where budgets actually stretch — though sample cost can be contained through refundable-sample mechanics tied to a creator’s output.

Fulfillment comes in three models, and the right one depends on how much of the operation a brand wants to own:

Fulfilled by TikTok is the hands-off end of that spectrum, letting a brand focus on content while the platform runs the logistics. Which model fits depends on the market and on how much of the operation a brand wants to own.

What Different European Markets Tell Us

The footprint now spans ten European markets. The UK, live since 2021, is the most mature. The EU wave followed in 2025 with Spain, then Germany, France, Italy and Ireland. And in June 2026 TikTok Shop added Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland.

That spread matters, because the offering is not identical everywhere. Fulfillment options, payment and logistics partners, introductory seller promotions and the maturity of local creator pools all vary by market. Germany, one of the five original EU markets, is a case in point: long assumed to resist live commerce, it has become one of the platform’s faster-growing European markets.

The structural advantage of the European rollout is cross-border. Where the UK launched as an island, the newer markets share a Sell Across Europe feature: one seller registration can cover multiple markets, with product descriptions easily localised and orders shipped directly or via TikTok Shop’s logistics partners. A strong position in one European market has become a springboard rather than a dead end.

Where TikTok Shop Belongs — and How Brands Start

The question in almost every conversation with marketplace managers is organisational: is this e-commerce or marketing? Burianek’s answer is that the reporting line matters less than the profiles around the table. You need content people, creator-relationship people, capable e-commerce operators and fulfillment expertise — and, hardest of all, one person with the mandate to pull them together. Where that person sits is secondary.

The recurring mistakes are consistent: judging the channel after a few weeks rather than the six months it needs to find its footing, and underestimating how much content and the creator community drive everything downstream. It is also not a self-service channel yet. “It’s a new channel, a new playbook — and my team is here to help,” says Burianek.

For brands still on the sidelines, the starting points are unglamorous: study the case studies now available across categories and markets; make it a real priority with a named owner, not a side project; and treat the operational setup — assortment, listings, inventory, the Shop Tab — as a discipline in its own right. Few brands do all of this in-house, either — a growing ecosystem of agencies and TikTok Shop partners covers live hosting, creator management and cross-border localisation.

For whoever runs the day-to-day:

• don’t list your whole catalogue — pick a handful of “hero products” that are easy to demonstrate and scale the ones that perform.
• Treat stock as a growth lever, not admin: a single video can go viral overnight, and a stockout mid-spike costs the sale and the momentum.
• don’t confuse follower count with reach — because content is pushed on merit rather than audience size, creators with a few thousand followers can outsell far bigger names.
• For the actual how-to — listings, inventory, live setup — the TikTok Shop Academy goes deep.

Key Learnings

• TikTok Shop inverts marketplace logic: demand is created through content, not captured through search. Being findable is not enough — you have to be watchable.
• The front end is new, but the back end is a standard regulated EU marketplace. GPSR, EPR, VAT and an EU Responsible Person apply as they would anywhere.
• The creator affiliate model is a cost-efficiency lever — creators are paid on sales, not flat fees — but only if you manage the creator pool as deliberately as a CRM.
• Commission (9%, 7% for electronics) undercuts most classic marketplaces, yet the real investment sits in content and creator relationships, not platform fees.
• It is not a fire-and-forget channel. Brands need a six-month horizon and a clear owner before judging whether it works.
• Offerings, fees and feature availability differ by European market — the UK setup is not automatically the German, French or Spanish one.
• Where the team reports matters less than having one person who can coordinate content, creators, commerce and logistics.

TikTok Shop is the marketplace option of Social Media behemoth TikTok. It enables brands and sellers across Europe to reach customers through shoppable content, LIVE shopping and creator collaborations.

Der Beitrag TikTok Shop 101: How it Works for Brands erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

MediaMarktSaturn doubles marketplace goals
MediaMarktSaturn used this week’s Strategy Day to set a marketplace target of €1.9bn GMV by 2029, up from roughly €800m today – but gave no overall e-commerce goal, with total group revenue barely moving from €23.1bn to €24bn. The vagueness comes as the JD.com takeover still awaits Brussels clearance. See more on Exciting Commerce

More News

Miravia becomes AliExpress’s European backbone
Miravia CEO Yann Fontaine has been named Head of Europe Local POP at AliExpress, taking charge of local sellers and brands across Europe. The dual role signals Alibaba is folding Miravia into AliExpress to sidestep the EU’s new cross-border customs fees. Read more on Marketing4ecommerce

Shein resumes Hong Kong IPO push
Shein has resumed preparations for a Hong Kong IPO after Chinese regulators gave their approval, aiming to raise several billion dollars. The valuation has fallen from a peak of $100bn to around $30bn. Find out more on Retaildetail

Vinted joins pan-European ad marketplace coalition
Vinted has joined Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, leboncoin/Kleinanzeigen and others as a founding member of the new European Media Marketplace, an ad-buying platform launching in five countries this September. It gives Vinted a new revenue lever built on its own shopper data. See more on Retailgazette

Castorama opens shop on Amazon.fr
Castorama has opened an official storefront on Amazon.fr, listing over 1,000 products from its own brands including Erbauer and GoodHome. The move follows 8.7% online sales growth in Q1 2026. Read more on Ecommercemag

Delivery News

Uber has paused Uber Eats launches in five of seven planned European markets while continuing to pursue a takeover of Delivery Hero, where it now holds a near-37% stake. Shareholders see Uber’s €33-per-share offer as too low. See the full story on cross-border-magazine

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Der Beitrag Marketplace Universe News 13.07.2026 – MediaMarktSaturn’s €1.9bn marketplace bet, and Shein’s IPO push erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

These are the 24 most important B2C marketplaces for selling to SPAIN

Last Updated: 13.07.2026

Market overview: Spain’s e-commerce engine keeps accelerating

Spain’s e-commerce market is not slowing down. According to ECDB, revenue is forecast to reach €50.0 billion in 2026, up 8.1% year-over-year from €46.2 billion in 2025 — and growth is expected to stay above 6.5% through the rest of the decade. Online penetration is climbing too: e-commerce now accounts for 9.8% of total Spanish retail, up from 9.2% a year earlier, and the trajectory points steadily upward through 2030.

What makes Spain particularly interesting from a marketplace perspective is its cross-border profile. Roughly 24% of Spanish e-commerce spend now flows to foreign stores rather than domestic ones — and of that outbound spend, an overwhelming 92% lands on Chinese platforms. No other destination comes close: the US takes just 4%, the UK 1.2%, France 1.0%, and Germany 0.9%. On the flip side, when foreign shoppers buy from Spanish stores, it’s mostly Portugal (54.2%) and Latin America (Argentina, Peru, Mexico) doing the buying — a reminder that Spain’s outbound and inbound cross-border flows run in almost entirely different directions.

This lopsided cross-border picture is exactly the backdrop against which our updated Marketplace Country Quadrant Spain needs to be read.

What’s changed? The Chinese takeover accelerates

Compared to the August 2025 version, the quadrant has shifted meaningfully:

• Shein ascends to the generalist tier. Shein’s Spanish revenue jumped from €2,517.9 million in 2024 to €4,557.7 million in 2025, according to ECDB — growth that started in Fashion but has since spread into Home & Living, Beauty & Care and beyond. Shein is no longer a fashion specialist with an unusually broad catalogue; it now competes across categories, and the quadrant reflects that.
• Miravia moves down, not out. With Shein vacating the fashion specialist slot, Miravia — Alibaba’s Spain-focused marketplace — steps into the specialist roles that Shein occupied: Fashion & Shoes, Home & Living, and Beauty & Care. Miravia remains one of the most important platforms in the Spanish market; its positioning has simply become more precise.
• TikTok Shop enters the quadrant. Launched in Spain only in 2025, TikTok Shop has made an immediate mark in Beauty & Care, displacing Veepee from that specific category slot. It is not yet strong enough to unseat ManoMano’s position in DIY & Garden — but as our Honorary Mention section below explains, that race is closer than it looks.

Three of the six generalist slots — AliExpress, Temu and now Shein — are Chinese-founded platforms, and Miravia (Alibaba-owned, Spain-focused) adds a fourth Chinese-linked name among the specialists. Combined with the 92% cross-border share cited above, the picture is unambiguous: Spain has become the most important European testing ground for Chinese marketplace expansion.

The 2026 Quadrant in detail

Generalists

• Amazon remains the anchor of Spanish e-commerce, unchallenged at the top of the generalist tier.
• El Corte Inglés continues to defend its position as Spain’s leading domestic department-store-turned-marketplace.
• Carrefour rounds out the local generalist presence with its grocery-led marketplace model.
• AliExpress stays entrenched as the price-driven cross-border pioneer in the Spanish market.
• Temu keeps pushing an aggressive, deal-driven generalist strategy across categories.
• Shein is new to this tier, having outgrown its fashion-specialist origins through rapid category expansion.

Specialists by category

• Fashion & Shoes: Miravia takes over the specialist slot vacated by Shein, alongside Zalando and Vinted, which holds its ground in resale and secondhand fashion.
• Electronics: MediaMarkt, PC Componentes and Back Market keep their unchanged positions as the category’s structural backbone.
• Home & Living: Miravia joins Veepee and ebay, replacing Shein in this category as well.
• DIY & Garden: ebay and Leroy Merlin are joined by ManoMano, which keeps its specialist spot despite a difficult year.
• Sports: Decathlon and tradeInn are joined by ebay, following Shein’s move to the generalist tier.
• Beauty & Care: Miravia and PromoFarma are joined by newcomer TikTok Shop, which takes the slot previously held by Veepee.

Honorary mention: Autodoc’s quiet car parts play

Not every relevant platform makes it into the quadrant’s core names, but some deserve a mention regardless. Autodoc, the car-parts marketplace, launched its Spanish B2C marketplace only in 2025 — following earlier rollouts in France, Germany and Austria — and is already a name worth watching in its niche.

Spain: The Test Lab for China’s European Marketplace Strategy

The Marketplace Country Quadrant Spain 2026 makes one thing clear: this is no longer a market where Chinese platforms are simply present — it is a market where they are setting the pace. Shein’s climb into the generalist tier, TikTok Shop’s immediate relevance in Beauty & Care, and AliExpress and Temu’s continued dominance of the price-driven end of the spectrum add up to a structural story, not a one-off trend.

That said, we’re resisting the temptation to write off the competition just yet. ManoMano held its DIY & Garden position against a fast-growing TikTok Shop this time around — but only just. TikTok Shop’s DIY & Garden push has become its second-most important category in other European markets after Beauty & Care, and if that pattern repeats in Spain, next year’s update may well tell a different story. For now, ManoMano keeps its spot; whether it can keep it in 2027 is genuinely open.

Want to add your voice?

Did we miss an emerging player in our analysis, or do you see the ManoMano vs. TikTok Shop race differently? Help us make the quadrant even more precise for 2027!

Do you have anything to add to our country quadrant for Spain? Let us know!

Interested in a different country or a specific product category? Check out all our quadrants here!

Der Beitrag Marketplace Country Quadrant Spain erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.

Fashion brands keep adding SKUs, keep adding channels, and keep being told to produce more visual content per product. Almost none of them have scaled their production process to match. In our latest Marketplace Universe webinar, together with PIXELMODA, the AI-powered content production company, we sat down with Gilmar, the Italian fashion group behind Iceberg, Iceberg Jeans, Paolo Pecora Milano and N°21, for a real case study on what closing that gap looks like on the inside — and what it can do for sales, returns and internal workload.

Why More Visual Content Directly Moves the Sales Needle

According to Wyzowl, a video marketing agency that publishes an annual industry benchmark survey, product pages with video convert up to 80% better than those without, across industries. Fewer surprises at delivery also means fewer returns: Narvar’s State of Returns 2024, an annual returns-behavior study among online shoppers, found that 42% of online fashion returns come down to wrong size or fit — a problem that richer, multi-angle imagery is built to solve.

The catch is cost. Fabio Lotto, Managing Director at PIXELMODA, put the industry’s average time-to-market between two and four weeks, from initial shooting to the product going live. Traditional studio production doesn’t scale with SKU volume, and budgets get cut before content does.

“It doesn’t make sense not to have a video for each SKU anymore,” Lotto said during the webinar — once the initial content investment is made, adding one costs next to nothing.

PIXELMODA’s answer combines AI-assisted production — where AI guides a real photo shoot in real time without altering the output — with AI-generated content, where images and video are created or extended algorithmically from a base shoot. Used together, Lotto says the company can bring clients from receiving products to published, approved images in as little as one day, three days on average. He cites returns reductions of 5% to 30% depending on how aggressively a brand expands its content, and cost savings of up to 90% on video specifically.

Gilmar’s Problem Wasn’t Technology — It Was Fragmentation

Gilmar’s starting point is a familiar one for multi-brand groups. Four brands, overlapping seasonal calendars, and a virtual showroom that needed finished images within two days of a shoot. Behind that deadline sat a seasonal roster of 28 external suppliers, on top of the models, stylists and photographers needed to shoot everything at once. Every brand team in the company was pulled into logistics rather than design work each season.

The spread matters strategically: a marketplace built around €5 stamp trades doesn’t need the same trust infrastructure as one selling €2,000 watches. That’s the thread the rest of this piece pulls on.

It’s also worth being explicit about why the top end of that range exists at all. A growing share of collectibles buyers aren’t purchasing to enjoy the object day to day — they’re treating it as an alternative asset, the same logic that applies to art or classic cars. A sealed trading card box or a rare vintage watch can gain value faster than more conventional investments in the right market window, and that reframes what a marketplace needs to provide: not just “does this work”, but “will this hold or gain value, and can I prove what I actually own.” That’s a fundamentally different promise than most e-commerce categories are built to make.

Marketplace Universe Insight: The bottleneck in fashion content production is rarely the shoot itself. It’s the number of handoffs — between suppliers, between brands, between markets — that a growing SKU count forces into an already tight seasonal window. Solving for “more content” without first solving for fragmentation just multiplies the coordination problem.

How Gilmar Restructured Its Production Around One Partner

Gilmar consolidated its content production under PIXELMODA as a single operational partner, covering shooting, styling, post-production and upload support across all four brands. Rather than jumping straight to fully AI-generated models, Gilmar chose a more conservative first step: real fit-model shoots combined with AI face-swapping. Valentina Fornara, Communication & Marketing Manager at Gilmar, explains that this keeps styling and posing under the creative team’s direct control while still cutting cost and coordination effort — the face swap alone, she notes, is a significant shift from a budget standpoint when producing across multiple brands and markets in parallel.

The result, in Fornara’s words, is a production calendar with “no last-minute changes” and full visibility into what ships when. Lotto estimates Gilmar’s cost reduction will land at 40–50% once the model is fully rolled out — a meaningful shift for a brand that was shooting internally before.

Marketplace Universe Insight: The brands getting the most out of AI content production right now aren’t the ones going furthest, fastest. They’re the ones treating AI-generated content as an extension of an existing production process rather than a wholesale replacement for it — and expanding step by step as trust in the output builds.

The Results After One Season

Comparing the new model against equivalent in-house production, Gilmar recorded the following after one season:

• Faster execution: +35%
• On-time content availability: +40%
• Internal workload: –40%
• Time-to-market: –30%
• Scalability: +50%
• Cost reduction: around –30%

These are early-season figures from a single client comparison rather than an industry benchmark, and Gilmar frames the shift as ongoing — video content and further AI-generated formats are the next step, not yet in production.

What This Means for Brands Beyond This One Case

The pattern that emerges from the webinar: brands don’t need to choose between AI-assisted production (real shoots, AI-optimised) and AI-generated content (synthetic models, backgrounds, video) — most clients combine both, adjusting the mix by SKU priority, market and budget. Zalando’s own campaign production illustrates the direction of travel: according to Reuters, more than 70% of its campaign visuals are now AI-generated, cutting lead times from weeks to days.

Key Learnings

• Video content converts significantly better than static images alone, though the size of the effect varies by category and brand.
• Fragmentation, not photography cost, is usually the real constraint on scaling fashion content across multiple brands and channels.
• A phased approach — starting with fit-model shoots and AI face-swapping rather than full virtual models — lets brand teams keep creative control while still cutting cost.
• Time-to-market of one to three days is achievable with AI-assisted workflows, against an industry average of two to four weeks.
• Early results from a single client are directional, not proof of a universal outcome — the right benchmark is your own current process, not an industry average.

PIXELMODA is an AI-powered visual content production company for fashion and luxury brands, combining human photography talent with proprietary and AI technology across image and video production. More at pixelmoda.net.

Want the full picture? Watch the complete webinar recording here.

07.07.2026 – Written by Ricarda Eichler, Journalist and Author for OHN

Der Beitrag More Content, Lower Costs: Inside One Fashion Group’s AI Production Overhaul erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.