The online environment in the Czech Republic will grow again. The German shopping chain Kaufland will launch a so-called online marketplace here on April 12. The company made the announcement in a press release on Tuesday. However, the platform will not offer food, just as, for example, Lidl will sell items from the housing, electronics, fashion or housing categories, from roughly two thousand sellers.
Shopping online is good for the Czechs, e-shops are doing well in the country. This also attracts many retail chains, which are gradually testing sales in the online environment as well. They are newly joined by the German company Kaufland, which promises millions of non-food items on the Kaufland.cz domain since mid-April.
The portal should operate on the marketplace model, i.e. an online marketplace. This means that the company will offer a space where Internet sellers, of which it currently has two thousand contracts, offer their products under their own name. “Customers will then receive the goods directly from the seller,” the company explains in a press release. However, all patronage and customer support is mediated by Kaufland.
It will initially be possible to pay using a credit card or PayPal.
The already functioning German e-shop Kaufland.de is one of the fastest growing marketplaces in Germany and offers goods from 9,000 sellers. A few weeks ago, Kaufland’s online marketplace was also launched in Slovakia.
Last year, Poland’s Allegro, which bought Mall Group’s e-shops, also launched operations in the Czech Republic. It is one of the twenty largest e-commerce platforms in the world. Amazon is number one.
Among the Czech retail stores, Tesco, for example, operates its e-shop. It was the first domestic chain to go online in 2012. A few years later, it was followed by Rohlík a Košík, which partially offers a selected assortment of the Kaufland brand. Lidl joined them with its own e-shop in 2017, but like Kaufland, it only offers non-food goods.
The Coop brand also operates its e-shop, and a test version is also offered in some cities by Penny Market, Albert and, recently, Billa.
Kaufland belongs to the German retail company Schwarz Gruppe, which also operates the Lidl brand in the Czech Republic. In the past financial year, which lasted from March 1, 2021 to February 28, 2022, the Kaufland chain increased its net profit in the Czech Republic by roughly 14 percent year-on-year to 3.3 billion crowns. The company’s sales increased by approximately one billion crowns to 58.8 billion crowns.
