Western brands tend to walk into CEE markets expecting familiar behaviour. Card-first checkout, standard ZIP-code address fields, and three-to-five day delivery as something customers will accept. None of those assumptions hold.
“Western brands often enter the CEE market assuming that, like in their home markets, checkout will show card-first behavior. But it does not,” says Martin Mitošinka, CEO and founder of isklad. That one line should probably be printed and taped above every market expansion team’s desk.
Cash on Delivery Is Not a Relic
In Romania and Greece, cash-on-delivery is not a niche preference. It is the dominant norm, with over 80 percent of online stores in those countries offering it as an option.
Poland operates on a different logic entirely. BLIK, a mobile-first instant payment method, commands a 74 percent market share there. Miss it in your checkout and you are effectively invisible to three-quarters of Polish shoppers.
The Carrier Problem Nobody Talks About Enough
Shipping logistics in CEE is not just about speed. In Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, customers have strong preferences for specific local carriers, and offering the wrong one is enough to lose the sale at the final step.
Romania adds another layer. Delivery companies there rely on a “county” field rather than ZIP codes. Sellers without proper address validation built into their checkout see their undelivered returns climb fast.
isklad Knows This Market Because It Built Its Business Here
isklad is a fully automated fulfillment provider based near Bratislava, operating out of a 23,000 square meter hub. It currently serves over 150 online stores and ships across Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Germany, Romania, and several other markets.
The company started small, in its early years it was handling 31,000 orders a month and turning away dozens of inquiries weekly due to capacity limits. It has since scaled significantly, and that growth has been built on understanding exactly the kind of friction it is now warning Western sellers about.
The Marketplace Speed Trap
Marketplaces like Allegro in Poland and eMAG in Romania have trained CEE shoppers to expect next-day or 48-hour delivery as a baseline. Czech platform Alza goes even further, offering next-morning delivery to parcel lockers for orders placed before midnight.
“Shipping with 3 to 5-day delivery can negatively impact conversion rates in the very markets online stores are trying to grow,” says Mitošinka. These are not premium delivery speeds. They are the floor.
COD Sounds Simple Until You Actually Run It
Adding cash-on-delivery sounds like a checkbox. In practice, it introduces cash reconciliation with carriers, more complex returns management, and float management across multiple currencies. isklad supports multi-currency COD in 17 countries, which gives it a rare operational view of just how messy this gets for providers entering the region without preparation.
Most Western Ecommerce Brands Are Not Actually Ready for CEE
CEE is frequently described as an untapped opportunity, and the numbers support that framing. The region has a growing middle class, rising digital penetration, and strong appetite for online shopping. But the narrative skips over the part where localisation is not a nice-to-have, it is the cost of entry.
The real issue is not that Western brands do not want to adapt. It is that the adaptation is harder than it looks, and many brands only find out what they missed after the conversion data comes in.
Our Take
CEE Doesn’t Need to Adapt to You
What isklad is describing is not new, but it keeps happening because market entry decisions are too often made by people who look at demographics and GDP numbers, not checkout flows and carrier preferences.
The region is genuinely worth pursuing. But treating CEE as a slightly different version of Western Europe is a shortcut that tends to be expensive. The sellers who do well there are the ones willing to let the market tell them what it needs, rather than assuming it will meet them halfway.
isklad’s position here is also worth noting. The company is not just offering an opinion. It processes orders across eight-plus markets and supports COD infrastructure in 17 countries. When it says these differences cost conversions, that claim is sitting on a lot of operational data.
