Maurice Junghans: What's next for Shopify merchants in Poland?

Recorded in English and published on 12 June 2025, so Shopify features, plans and fees reflect that time; where something has changed, we add a dated 2026 update. We leave out the teaser at the start of the video.

Shopify has entered the Polish market

Tomek: Welcome, everyone, to the next episode of Flying with Shopify. Shopify has finally entered the Polish market, and today we have a great opportunity to discuss it and get more insights from our guest, Maurice Junghans, who came to the studio to tell us how Shopify's expansion will affect Polish merchants. Maurice, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself?

Maurice: Of course. Thank you for the introduction and for the invitation to this podcast. I'm very glad to be here with you. A few words about myself: my name is Maurice and I've been working at Shopify for over four years, in the commercial team. I started in the German market for the German expansion, so I was one of the first people on the ground who started this motion in a non-English-speaking market. Now I'm very glad I can continue with migrations from other platforms to Shopify Plus in the Polish market, since we launched Shopify Payments this year. Looking forward to talking today.

Tomek: Great. That only proves we've invited the right person.

What is Shopify's strategy for Poland?

Maciek: So let's kick it off with the first question. Could you tell us a bit more about Shopify's vision and strategy for its presence in Poland?

Maurice: I think for this it's important to compare with other markets, just to see what might happen in the near future. For context, I've been at Shopify a little over four years. I started for the German, or DACH, market, so the German-speaking region, as one of the first people on the ground supporting migrations from systems like Shopware, Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus.

Right now we have a similar situation here in Poland. We have the first dedicated people talking to merchants and to partners in Poland, and that's how the whole growth story kicked off in the German-speaking region. Now we're here for the Polish region. What has happened so far is that we've gathered a network of great partners in the market, like you, who did maybe the most important groundwork: spreading the word about Shopify, what we do, how we do it and how it differs from other platforms and tech providers. We've already seen enough growth that Shopify believes that if we start investing now, we can turn the linear growth we've had until now into hockey-stick growth. That's why Shopify is investing in the market, but I believe we'll come to a few more figures later in the conversation.

How is the Polish market similar to Germany and the Czech Republic?

Tomek: Sure. Talking about similarities and the things that are done differently in Poland than in, let's say, the German market, can you share some experience on that?

Maurice: Comparing Germany, Poland and also the Czech Republic, which I'm also responsible for: there is always a local provider that is very big and very dominant in the market. For Germany it's Shopware, for Poland it's Shoper, for the Czech Republic it's Shoptet. They have a strong presence, but usually with local businesses. For local businesses they're perfectly built and developed, but once a business looks into international expansion, these platforms usually come with a lot of customisation needs and a lot of problems for that part of the expansion. That's exactly where Shopify fits in perfectly, because Shopify, as an international business operating all over the globe, is built for international expansion. That's the use case we especially talk about with businesses that want to sell beyond borders, beyond the Polish market. So I think that's the main similarity.

What we see here in Poland is that there are a lot of custom solutions, and that's the same in the Czech market. In Germany, custom solutions are very rare. You see them in the top enterprise segment, businesses doing more than 250 million euros in revenue, so about one billion złoty. Below that, it's usually a platform. Approaching businesses on custom platforms is always a little harder, because the whole mindset needs to shift if you're moving from a custom platform to a tech provider. Not necessarily because it's rationally a big change, but in people's heads, going from fully custom to something that might impose some limitations is a hard move.

Maciek: Yes, because you have a custom business model or processes covered.

Maurice: Logic.

Maciek: Logic, and then it's hard to compromise. It's always a trade-off to move to something out of the box.

Shopify Payments in Poland: benefits and concerns

Maciek: I fully agree with what you said about local custom solutions, and that touches a very sensitive element of Shopify entering the Polish market: Shopify Payments, of course, and the many functionalities connected to it. Compared with Polish local payment providers, we face the problem of different, higher rates. Could you explain what other benefits Shopify Payments brings to merchants? I think there are some misconceptions about how it works, and Polish merchants only compare the rates and conclude that it's still too much. What's your answer to such concerns?

Maurice: There are two answers to that question. The first one is the advantage of using Shopify Payments. By the way, this is also one of the reasons I'm sitting here and that Shopify is now investing further in the Polish market. With the launch of Shopify Payments, the Shopify product is basically released as a whole. It gives the platform an unfair advantage, because it allows you to set up multiple markets you can sell to from one back end. You can have individual front ends per market, individual languages, individual currencies, individual shipping rules and shipping providers per market, and you can basically contextualise for every market you sell to. This functionality really only comes out when you use Shopify Payments as the main payment gateway.

That's the advantage it gives, and that's also why in Germany it was available from the start when I joined. It just makes selling Shopify very easy, especially for businesses operating across borders. In Germany it's not even that important, because it's a euro country with many euro countries around it. If you expand, maybe first to the Benelux, nothing changes. But for Poland it's very relevant, because you might first expand into a euro country, or into the Czech Republic, or into other markets with other currencies. So it's hyper-relevant.

And there's another side to this topic, and I get it very much, because Polish people are very similar to Germans. I can say that because I'm both German and Polish, so I have both mixed in myself.

Maciek: Which is why, sorry, the second part of the episode will be conducted in Polish.

Maurice: In Polish, exactly. Looking forward to it.

Maciek: Thank you for clarifying.

Maurice: Let's see if we run out of time. No, but being conscious of the cost of a product is super important, and that's why, especially for merchants on Shopify Plus, there are the rates. We always have the standard rates, which in some cases are already competitive, but not in all cases, and we get that. Because of that, it's also possible to negotiate the rates with Shopify. For Shopify Plus or enterprise clients, our payments product competes with all the local payment gateways, whether in Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic, and we need to be competitive. So you can actually do what we call a rate review and get better pricing for your payment rates. All in all, the card transaction rates may still be a little higher, but the competitive advantage you get from using Markets might actually make up for an increase of 0.02 in the rate or so.

Maciek: I must say that, for the time being, we see that Polish merchants, at least our customers, weren't super enthusiastic about the rates, and we don't see that much traction. It's different for brands that are really into scaling globally; they see the point in choosing this option. But I think it's specific to the Polish market, where the rates of Polish payment gateways are really low compared with the European standard, and I assume that's the reason behind the current popularity of the solution.

Maurice: Totally fair. What I would suggest to anyone in the enterprise segment who is considering Shopify is to talk to us, because then we can set up a full commercial overview, a TCO overview of your specific use case. Because yes, we know that for a business doing 100 million złoty in yearly transactions, the level of payment fees is relevant.

2026 update (as of 6 November 2026): Shopify's pricing page for Poland lists online card rates from 1.95% + PLN 1.20 on Basic to 1.45% + PLN 1.20 on Plus, and BLIK at 1.3% + PLN 1.20 (0.9% + PLN 1.20 on Plus); showing prices in local currencies and accepting local payment methods still require Shopify Payments (shopify.com/pl/pricing). BLIK works in Shopify Payments when the store's currency is PLN or it has a Poland market in PLN, and the customer enters a Polish address (help.shopify.com). Plus rates are a starting point and can differ after a rate review.

Maciek: Absolutely. And you've already answered another question, whether the fees are negotiable. You said there's room for negotiation, but also that the full picture of the total cost of ownership needs to be calculated, and you, as Shopify, can help merchants make the proper calculation, which we encourage everyone considering it to do.

How does feedback from Polish merchants shape Shopify's roadmap?

Maciek: Another question: since Shopify entered the Polish market this year, a few months ago already, I believe you're receiving a lot of feedback from Polish merchants. How has that feedback influenced the roadmap or the features you're planning to deliver here in Poland?

Maurice: For this part of the business, there's obviously the release of Shopify Editions, which is something we really celebrate at Shopify: our twice-yearly release, or announcement, of features. I think it was released a week, a week and a half ago. It was 150 new features, really cool stuff. I recommend everyone look at this presentation of what Shopify is doing and where Shopify is investing its money. So that's the result, but what actually goes into the pipeline? That's the question, right?

How is merchants' feedback translated into those features? It's a very straightforward process. On Shopify's side, all feedback from merchants is gathered into a huge dashboard, a pipeline of feedback. It can be complaints, ideas, whatever you name it. All of it is gathered, and a team groups and ranks it. The more often a feature, or the lack of a feature, is mentioned, the higher it moves in the ranking. That's an invitation to all merchants already using Shopify in the Polish market: give this feedback to support and through all the channels you have to Shopify, because you are the ones most responsible for development in your market. The more merchants raise their voice, the faster those feature requests move up in relevance.

We know there are some features that are quite necessary for the Polish market for Shopify to really be considered a local provider. My colleagues and I are doing our part by talking to you, to merchants and to the Polish market, to give those features a little extra push. Some features are a must, whereas other features moving up the pipeline are just nice to have, which is of course also nice, but for the Polish market they're not that existential.

Maciek: I think what Polish Shopify merchants are probably waiting for most would be the integration with Allegro, probably POS, and integrations with comparison engines, local ERPs or accounting software. But I assume it's just a matter of time.

Shopify Editions Summer '25: Maurice's favourite feature

Maciek: Just a quick side note. We discussed the last Summer Edition, and I think for the first time in maybe a year and a half we were really impressed with what's going on. Which feature was your favourite?

Maurice: From the latest Edition? For me it's maybe the most obvious one, but it's probably going to be the most relevant, especially as it develops further: building the front end with AI support. You can give textual context, textual wishes of what you would like to have, and Shopify builds those elements for the storefront for you. I'm not the most technically versed person, so this feature may not be the most relevant for a developer. But from my perspective, when we build demos for customers considering Shopify, they might have worked on a specific storefront feature in their custom solution for weeks or even months. And you might be able to achieve this with no technical knowledge, just with your fingertips.

Maciek: Finger prompts.

Maurice: Exactly. And get a result just like what was achieved through weeks of development.

Maciek: And it's just the first version of this feature, so I'm looking forward to seeing where we are in a year or two.

Maurice: Me too.

2026 update: the feature Maurice describes shipped in Shopify Editions Summer '25 as "Generate blocks" for the new Horizon themes: you describe a theme block in words and AI builds it (shopify.com/editions/summer2025). In our projects, blocks generated this way go through a developer's review before they go live.

How does Shopify stay compliant with EU regulations?

Maciek: Okay, let's get back to it. What is Shopify's strategy for staying compliant with regulations in Europe? Compared with the US, we all know the European Union is way more…

Maurice: Sophisticated.

Maciek: Sophisticated, that's the word. So what do you do to stay compliant?

Maurice: This topic actually goes hand in hand with a little frustration on the merchant side, maybe not for the reason most businesses might think. If you look at Shopify in the US or Canada, it's a bit different. You have far more features available, maybe also cooler features, but they're simply not published in the European Union, or outside the US and Canada, because of laws and regulations. So Shopify has teams working on fitting into local regulations. That's how we make sure we're compliant on data security and always follow GDPR requirements. Especially from working in the German and Swiss markets, I can tell you this topic is more important than commercials. If you can put a check mark next to data regulation, pricing is maybe in fourth place, just because it's so much in the heads of my fellow people.

So Shopify has teams always working on that. For example, we have a DPA, a data processing agreement, in place with all our merchants, and we're constantly monitoring what changes and what the European court decides, and then we adapt. I think I'm not allowed to talk about the size of Shopify in Europe specifically, but you can run some reports on some platforms and you'll see there are hundreds of thousands of stores running on Shopify in the EU. Shopify has a responsibility there, and that's the part we need to fulfil. Then there are regulations like the accessibility regulations that are now coming into force, and there Shopify gives you the right foundation to comply with those laws and rules. But we also rely on our extensive partner network, which can also be you, helping the merchants you work with build stores that comply with the regulations.

2026 update: the European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 and covers online stores; microenterprises are exempt from the service obligations (Directive (EU) 2019/882). In Poland it is implemented by the Act of 26 April 2024 (Journal of Laws 2024, item 731).

Maciek: I think that's one of the biggest advantages of a software-as-a-service solution: you can just focus on running your business and not worry about…

Tomek: The technology.

Maciek: Yes, the technology, and about being compliant with regulations. It's a huge win.

Misconceptions about Shopify Plus: can it handle the traffic?

Maciek: On that note, I think we can switch gears to a slightly different subject and talk more about Shopify Plus for enterprise.

Tomek: Yes, let's go into the details. What is the main misconception about Shopify as a boxed product for small businesses? When we explain to someone who doesn't know Shopify at all that huge enterprises also use Shopify for their e-commerce, they're always surprised. How would you explain it to someone who doesn't believe it?

Maurice: I can start with a quick quote. I think we have it in one of our marketing campaigns right now: "Shopify: no entrepreneur too small, no enterprise too big." That's a very bold statement, but I think we have the data and the merchants that support it.

Maciek: I feel Shopify is probably the only solution on the market that fits the needs of each level, each segment of the market, really well.

Maurice: I think so too. To really cover the enterprise area: everyone knows Shopify for smaller and growing businesses, for people starting out. It's a really great solution and comes with everything you need. But in enterprise, the product and the approach to Shopify look a little different. I think there are three main misconceptions. The first one is for really big businesses, or businesses with heavy traffic on specific days, running sales and events: they're scared Shopify might not be able to handle the traffic.

Maciek: And so far only Taylor Swift has managed to break Shopify for a couple of minutes.

Maurice: Did she break it?

Tomek: Yes, she did.

Maurice: Okay, that's going to break my point here.

Tomek: No worries.

Maurice: But it shows that Taylor Swift, the most famous artist, I guess, or the most followed…

Maciek: We're not Swifties.

Maurice: No Swifties here. But there are a lot of Swifties on this planet, I think we can agree on that. And she, or probably not she but her team, chose Shopify as a platform. So did Supreme, a brand that works exclusively with drops: at one specific moment there's a countdown, then hundreds of thousands of people push those buttons, and tens of thousands of checkouts per minute go through Shopify. They chose Shopify for a reason.

In Germany, to name another example, we have More Nutrition and ESN, maybe one of the biggest supplement providers in Europe right now, and they do basically the same. They always have products in stock that you can buy any time, but every Sunday they have a drop of specific products, maybe new products or discounts, and every Sunday they have multiple tens of thousands of checkouts per minute. It's a huge business, they're still on Shopify, and they're growing very rapidly. If you look up the numbers of The Quality Group, which holds them, it's crazy what they're achieving, and they chose Shopify as a partner. Not by accident.

Is Shopify only for small and mono-brand stores?

Maurice: The second misconception: we've already had some examples of bigger brands, but many people think Shopify is just for small brands or for mono-brand stores. Those are maybe most of the stores you see, right? Millions of businesses use Shopify, many of them small, and we're very proud of them. They're the heart and the backbone of Shopify; without them, Shopify probably wouldn't exist, or not in the way it does today.

But there are a couple of examples I can bring in. Westwing migrated to Shopify in the past year. They're a publicly listed company, so you can look up their revenue. They sell in 12 markets and use one Shopify back end to do it. Look at their revenue and the complexity of their business: they came from a custom solution, their tech team evaluated the best option, especially from a TCO perspective, and Shopify was the choice. The same applies to the next two examples, from the UK and from Australia. Boden in the UK is a huge retailer with a huge number of SKUs and a very complex business model; they also migrated to Shopify. And JB Hi-Fi is probably the MediaMarkt of Australia. They have lots of retail locations all over the country, and their online store has around 1 billion dollars in annual revenue. They actually started with a migration from custom to Shopify six or seven years ago, at 200 million in revenue, and then they scaled and quadrupled their business with Shopify as its backbone.

Maciek: Because I broke your point, I feel obliged to give an argument for the traffic side. We see a spike in inbound requests to our agency, usually after Black Friday.

Maurice: When other platforms can't handle it. Definitely.

Tomek: I'd also add from our experience: we've been providing Shopify services for, wow, eight years now, because we became a partner in 2017, and our merchants have never had a problem with the service during Black Friday or Cyber Monday. So when it comes to handling huge traffic, I wouldn't find any better solution than Shopify.

Shopify vs Magento: when does a migration make sense?

Maciek: You mentioned total cost of ownership. Can you tell us how Shopify compares with the most popular engines out there?

Maurice: I think Magento would be a good comparison.

Tomek: Yes, especially for enterprise customers.

Maurice: We see lots of migrations from Magento across all the regions we operate in, and we've had thousands of enterprise migrations, the bigger projects, from Magento to Shopify Plus. Usually the tipping point, when merchants said "Okay, we're sick of this, we're looking for a change", was when another big update was coming for their current system. They had to run several patches and updates for some features, which then have interdependencies, and things can get very hacky on those highly customised systems. And with the cost of the update, merchants were confused: "What am I paying this money for? There's no change to my store at all. Nothing is getting better, but I'm paying a huge amount of money." That's sometimes the tipping point where merchants say: "Okay, let's talk to a Shopify agency, a Shopify partner."

Maciek: We can confirm.

Maurice: And if the price of the migration is more or less the price of the update, or maybe a little more, but you know there won't be much updating in the future, that's maybe when it clicks in your head: "Okay, what am I waiting for?" In this scenario that's the big TCO difference.

On top of that, Shopify provides a full enterprise SaaS architecture. You're using the same setup as Westwing or JB Hi-Fi, even if you're a business doing 10 million euros in revenue, which is just amazing to know. We're the biggest Google Cloud partner on the whole planet, and you get full CDN services backed by Cloudflare. That's a setup that would usually cost you a lot more if you bought it yourself. We sometimes see that the monthly cost of Shopify is lower than the hosting costs merchants have. And then add DevOps and updates, without any further development of the store; that's just maintenance. It's sometimes so high that switching to Shopify is the logical step.

Maciek: It's also the team you need to maintain the store, the developers if you hire them, or the fees you pay an agency.

Tomek: That's one of the arguments I use in sales calls with potential customers. I tell them: "After the launch, you actually don't need us for daily maintenance. You don't need us as developers, and you don't need an agency to support your daily activities, because you can do it yourself." That's definitely a huge benefit, and it lowers the maintenance cost of the whole solution.

Which metrics show that a migration to Shopify paid off?

Tomek: Another thing: you've supported maybe not thousands but hundreds of migrations from different platforms to Shopify. Which success metrics do merchants use after a migration to prove it was the right move? Which would you pick as the most common?

Maurice: I think there are three that always come up, though not every merchant uses the same metrics, because everyone has different goals and expectations. As I mentioned in the case of Westwing, and it's the case for many migrations, the first is bringing down cost: running costs, basically the TCO of the whole project. We usually have a very compelling offer for migrations from other enterprise platforms, especially the very enterprise ones like Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Hybris or SAP Commerce Cloud, or Magento, now Adobe Commerce. The cost of maintaining and running those systems compared with Shopify is an immense gap, and the same goes for custom platforms with a big team to maintain them. That's one metric people usually look at, especially businesses that no longer expect to grow 25% year over year and need to see where they can cut costs.

We're in, I would say, not the most optimistic economic situation in some markets; in some regions the market is stagnating. You can probably see it in Germany: I think GDP is actually shrinking right now, and has been for quite some time. That means consumers' purchasing power is shrinking, and businesses need to make sure they're running a sustainable business. As long as money is free and it just rains down, you can put it into very complex tools you have for no reason. But once that realisation comes, driving down TCO is one big factor.

Why is the Shopify checkout a conversion driver?

Maurice: The second one is conversion rate. I have to mention this here because I think we mention it everywhere: the Shopify checkout is a conversion booster in itself. There was a study by one of the top three consulting firms that compared the Shopify checkout with checkouts of various other platforms. The Shopify checkout is already a sign of trust. You can customise it, but at its base, the functionality and logic behind it, you know it. You know it as an agency, but also as a consumer. It builds trust, it feels familiar.

Especially in the US, Shop Pay is also a conversion driver, because of the Shop app behind it. I won't dive too deep into this, but it lets you track your shipments and all your orders in one app, so it's probably a bit comparable to InPost in Poland.

Maciek: Probably, yes.

Maurice: But it's built by Shopify. So the checkout drives conversion just because it builds trust and it works: there's no downtime, it's fast, and Shopify keeps optimising it. That's the core of our business. And it's one thing I wanted to say earlier about the enterprise setup: Shopify is an API-first platform. You can use all the other tools on the market together with Shopify and integrate everything. You can use a different PIM; as an enterprise you should probably use an ERP; you'll have an external CRM and other platforms integrated with Shopify. But there's one key component you'll always use if you work with Shopify, and that's our checkout. It's the component we're most proud of, and there's no Shopify customer that doesn't use our checkout.

Maciek: I've heard that some brands even choose only the Shopify checkout for non-Shopify platforms. It's that good.

Maurice: Exactly. At least the checkout is always the thing you use, because it works. It's the one thing you can totally rely on.

Tomek: That's true. We've seen it after migrations from other platforms: we had cases where the storefront was migrated one to one and looked exactly the same. The only thing that was different was the checkout, and we saw spikes in conversion rates.

What are the signs that you're ready to move to Shopify?

Maciek: One thing I'd like to follow up on, maybe to clarify and make a list of the signs: what are the good signs that you qualify for switching to Shopify? We've discussed the technological barrier and the total cost of ownership. Are there any other indicators that you're good to go?

Maurice: I wish it were that easy to always find an indicator in every business. To be honest, some merchants are happy with their current situation, maybe because they don't know how it could look different. We often hear this after migrations from merchants, and especially from the people working with the store. In bigger businesses, in the end there's just a spreadsheet with numbers coming in; if it looks good, it's good. But what really matters is also the experience of working with the platform: how nice the UX and UI are. If you compare Shopify with almost any other system in the world, especially in the enterprise segment, those are a pain to work with. They look like Windows 95 or something.

Maciek: Which was good in 95.

Maurice: But a couple of years have passed since then.

Maciek: A lot.

Maurice: So that's very hard to point to and very hard to measure, except for the people who approach us after a migration, super happy to be working with Shopify. They come up to my colleagues and me at expos and events and tell us how happy they are to be using Shopify now, which is probably very rare when you've sold someone a product. Mostly it's "this didn't go well, that didn't go well". But it's not measurable.

What is measurable are factors like the one we just had: a big update is coming to your current system, so let's evaluate whether switching platforms might solve this pain, because updates are not just costly, they're also painful, since things can go wrong. That's one of the bigger factors. Another one: in all the discoveries with the merchants we talk to, I try to understand whether their current tech provider, whether a custom solution or another company they buy from, is actually an enabler, a disabler or just neutral. Is it raising the bar for your business? Is it helping you grow?

Shopify invests almost all the money it earns into its developer team, which creates Shopify Editions, coming back to a couple of minutes ago.

Maciek: Yes, that's true. Annual research and development spending two years ago was 2 billion dollars, something near that.

Maurice: 1.7 billion US dollars. Some of it probably goes into maintaining the products to keep them up to date, which is also very important so they don't break, but it also goes into new features. You can see it in all the AI-focused features we've just released and are working on right now. You can see it in the whole Markets topic, and in payments: Shopify Payments was released here in Poland, and it's going to be released in many more markets in the future. Just scroll through Shopify Editions and you'll get a glimpse of what's happening under the hood. There's also the full B2B storefront we provided. That project started, I believe, two years ago with the first release, and now we have B2B-only businesses doing hundreds of millions in revenue through their Shopify storefront.

Maciek: We used to lose a lot of B2B clients who were looking for a platform.

Maurice: Before, yes.

How mature is B2B on Shopify?

Tomek: I'm glad you touched on B2B, because we hadn't mentioned it. When you choose Shopify Plus, you can start selling in a different channel, the B2B channel. Can you elaborate a bit on how complex a solution it is now? Not in great detail, but in general: is it the right tool for a company looking for a reliable, serious and complex B2B solution, or is it more of an extra to your regular business?

Maurice: I think it came from businesses doing D2C sales. The main business was D2C, but there was also B2B interest. Maybe they had a very old-school workflow for B2B transactions, by email, by phone and so on, and this was a very simple way to kick off another sales channel. It's a different storefront. You can set up specific companies as customers, a company can have multiple entities and multiple personas under it, and they have different price lists. Everything is individualised for those specific customers. That's how it started.

Since then, we've noticed that interest in the B2B platform is so big that Shopify is putting more and more investment into it, again probably based on the ranking mechanism: the more a feature set is demanded, the more we develop there. The B2B segment is a bit different from D2C sales. It's very often far more customised and much more process-heavy than sales-heavy, so B2B shops aren't the most inspiring ones you'll see. There are some, I've seen a few and we've talked to some of them, but most of them need their processes with suppliers to work. So what Shopify, and the partner ecosystem building on Shopify APIs, is doing is building a feature set you can customise to your needs: approval workflows within the B2B sales channel, or uploading CSV files that are automatically turned into a cart, or into products you can add to your cart. It's not as sexy as what we do in D2C, but these are necessary processes that help us win more deals in that sector.

Here too, as with pricing earlier, I'd recommend talking to Shopify if you're a B2B business of decent size, to see whether your requirements match what Shopify does and its flexibility. Merchants are very often surprised how flexible it is and how often we can say: "You press two buttons and you have that."

Maciek: By default.

Maurice: By default. And that would probably cost you 30,000 to develop on your current platform. So definitely reach out to us, to you guys, and we can talk about it.

2026 update: since 2 April 2026, Shopify's core B2B features (companies and locations, up to three B2B catalogs, net payment terms, volume pricing, quantity rules) are also available on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans; unlimited catalogs and price lists assigned directly to a company remain Shopify Plus features (changelog.shopify.com, help.shopify.com). We cover the most common B2B questions in the episode Shopify Plus B2B: common client questions before implementation.

How does Shopify approach Polish marketplaces, ERPs and comparison sites?

Maciek: Maybe we could switch gears to another subject and talk about the Polish e-commerce ecosystem. How do you approach cooperation with the major players in Polish e-commerce, like marketplaces, ERPs, payment providers and so on? Do you have plans for that, and are you in conversations with them? What's the story here?

Maurice: I can't give too deep an insight under the hood of Shopify there, but I can share the general approach to partnerships. To start off, partnerships are the backbone of Shopify. The ecosystem is what makes Shopify so strong. Without you in the market, Shopify wouldn't do too well here.

Maciek: Me and Tom.

Maurice: Exactly, the two of you. And maybe two or three more. Without you, it just wouldn't work. Shopify can't operate by itself in hundreds of markets on this planet; that's not how a business like this works. We rely on our partners in the market.

For integrations with local partners, there are always two approaches. We have our own partnerships team talking to those businesses. I can't tell you whether they're talking to them specifically right now or how advanced those conversations are. But in all the major markets we're integrated with those providers. And there's always a tipping point in every market where Shopify becomes so relevant that the providers need to build the integration themselves, because Shopify has become a relevant partner for them.

Maciek: I think in Poland we're already past that point. Brands that didn't want to hear about Shopify five years ago, when we talked to them about integrations, are now knocking on our doors asking for a way into the Shopify ecosystem.

Maurice: Okay, that's a good sign. That means Shopify also has to qualify a bit and see which partners are the most relevant, and I believe we've already mentioned some of the names of the most important partners in the market. I believe there will be conversations from our partnerships team, and it's always worth mentioning those partners to me and my colleagues. If you have an entry point to, let's say, Allegro or a similar partner, and you know they really want to talk to us, just connect us and we'll pick up the conversation from there. Again, partnerships are the backbone of our business, and we're happy to talk to and partner with the relevant local partners.

Shopify agencies and partners in Poland

Tomek: I just wanted to ask, since you talked about our role in Shopify's expansion here, and we're really glad to hear that: one of the potential questions from a merchant considering Shopify is what support will look like after the migration. How do you see the ecosystem of Polish agencies specialised in Shopify? How many are there, and how do you see their interest in becoming Shopify partners?

Maurice: First of all, I don't know the exact number of partners in the Shopify ecosystem, also because it's growing. There are a few certified partners; I think the number should be around eight to ten, somewhere in that ballpark. Those are the partners doing the main groundwork. And then, of course, technically anyone can be a Shopify partner. There are freelancers doing this, maybe based in Poland but working only for US businesses. There are many scenarios.

But there's one very important thing to highlight. Shopify in Poland is a strongly growing business, and maybe that's something we haven't talked about: Europe in general is Shopify's fastest-growing region. That means Shopify as a business is also putting most of its investment into the European market, because we see that investment there gets us a better ROI than in other markets. So the hunger is there, and it's growing strongly. The very fact that I'm here today, and not just today, I've visited Warsaw and other Polish cities a few times already, talking to merchants and having great conversations, shows there's an appetite for more Shopify in the market. Betting on Shopify is becoming inevitable.

There aren't really many options. If you say no to Shopify as a partner, whether as a tech partner or an agency partner, you'll probably miss out on a lot of business already today, and even more in the future. We saw that in the German market too. We had partners who had been partners for ten years or more, and they have an unfair advantage, because they have the customer success stories, so many migrations and successful stories under their belt. That builds trust and helps them grow even further. In Germany, after four years in the market, I think I personally worked on over 200 migrations from other systems to Shopify Plus. Agencies deciding only now to say yes to Shopify as an agency partner lag behind. They lack the trust and the experience, and merchants considering a change will partner with experienced partners who have a name in the Shopify ecosystem. So my advice is that everyone not yet considering partnering with Shopify, whether a CRM or an ERP, should reach out and see how we can work together and do successful business together.

Maciek: Well said. And I can only confirm that for us, partnering with Shopify has been the main growth driver of the last few years. When we were doing our first Shopify migration, our team was maybe ten people. A couple of years down the road, it's about six times that.

Maurice: Six times. Absolutely.

Does Shopify compete with agencies for clients?

Maciek: One last question on partnerships. We hear from colleagues at other agencies that they're somewhat concerned about internal competition with the Shopify team when working together on closing a lead. Is there a threshold of brands that you would handle yourself and take over from agencies? We haven't had that kind of experience, but maybe some people need reassurance.

Maurice: That's a fair question, because I believe all these businesses have different approaches. At Shopify we have our professional services team, and you can pay them to support your migration. Usually that only happens in the enterprise space, for businesses doing one billion złoty in yearly revenue. That's where professional services really has to come in, and where Shopify actually says: "You, as a partner, have to collaborate with our professional services team." That then becomes part of the agreement with Shopify. For businesses of that size it's a different kind of complexity, and we want to make sure everything goes well and go-live dates are met.

The threshold we chose is 250 million US dollars. You have to draw the line somewhere. You might want that support at 150 million, or it might only be necessary above 400 million, but we set the boundary at 250. Below that, we rely, or want to rely, 100% on our agency ecosystem in the market.

There's one more thing I'd like to add. Especially for migrations, we want them done by partners with migration experience, because for Shopify a merchant first becomes valuable as a partner once they've actually migrated and start transacting through the Shopify platform. Before that, yes, there's the fixed licence fee, but that's not the goal. The goal is to get you onto Shopify and grow your business, to increase conversion and so on. That's our main goal, and we know that you, as experienced partners, can achieve it in the best way.

Then there's a point I think is very relevant, which you also mentioned: the whole retainer game on the agency side, or further store development. You said that once the migration is done, a merchant can just operate their store. That's true. They can run it, and they can create new landing pages, especially now; it's going to get easier and easier. But building custom new features, testing new features, and relying on a partner for creative input is something we 100% see on the Shopify partner side and really encourage on the merchant side. We don't want merchants to have Shopify just as a platform that runs their business. We want it to be a platform they can experiment on, grow on and find new ways to use.

Will AI change the role of Shopify agencies and app developers?

Maciek: I have one more question that's really bothering me. As I said before the recording, my LinkedIn feed is full of opinions and comments after this year's Shopify Editions and Shopify Unite in Toronto. Agency owners and founders of apps in the Shopify ecosystem are at the same time excited and concerned about the future of agencies and apps as AI is adopted, especially with building storefronts with AI, Sidekick's advanced reasoning and so on. Everybody's curious what the future holds for them. Can you share anything, nothing sensitive, about the plans, and do you think agencies and partners will have to reimagine their mission and vision for growth in the ecosystem?

Maurice: A couple of points. I've just been to Toronto, where we heard Tobi, our CEO, speak about Shopify and its vision. First of all, if anyone in the agency ecosystem is a little worried, I think I have more reason to be worried, because I'm sitting…

Maciek: We read the memo.

Maurice: Exactly. No, I think there's actually no reason to worry at all. Tobi Lütke has one very strong opinion that I'd like to bring in as an answer here. How many are we, 9,000 employees at Shopify or something?

Maciek: But then again, Tobi is from Germany too, so I think you're okay.

Maurice: You'd think so. No, what he always says is that AI, and everything that comes with it, should be seen as an enabler for the people working on those topics: on storefronts, in sales, in product, it doesn't really matter. It should be an enabler that makes you better at what you do and gives you more output. It shouldn't necessarily be seen as something that makes people redundant, but as something that helps people get better outputs, probably in a shorter time.

That's really the vision we have at Shopify: to make people more efficient, whether internally or by empowering our merchants and also partners. Because yes, Shopify gives you all those tools, but will the merchants ultimately use them, or will you be the ones using them? It might vary from use case to use case. Then again, the Shopify partner ecosystem has been changing for, as you said, eight years now. It's always been changing; every year with Shopify is a year of change. That can be a beauty, but it can also be tough. I guess the agencies and partners that adapt best to those circumstances will be the ones that benefit from the overall developments in the market.

But I think the need for Shopify is so big and the growth so strong that, and this is a personal opinion now, there won't be any replacement any time soon. It will just drive more merchants and more interest to Shopify. You said your LinkedIn feed is full; the LinkedIn feed of merchants who aren't on Shopify is probably full too. They're getting more curious, they're starting to test things, and they'll start talking to you and to me. I think that will just help everyone connected to Shopify.

Maciek: Some words of wisdom.

2026 update: Shopify's pricing page for Poland now also lists an Agentic plan at PLN 0 a month, "for selling in AI channels" (shopify.com/pl/pricing). How we prepare stores for AI shopping assistants is described on our Agentic Commerce for Shopify page.

What's next for Shopify in Poland?

Tomek: We could almost end the episode here. But before we do, I'd like to ask you to share your vision for Shopify's further development in Poland, since that's the subject of today's episode.

Maurice: As you can already see, someone from Shopify is here in Poland, which I think is very much appreciated; I can already feel it, and I always get very positive comments when I'm here. But even though I speak a little Polish, it's usually just enough for small talk, a rather informal conversation. My vision, and this is also how it's going to happen, is that we'll have dedicated partner managers for our agency and tech partner landscape, dedicated commercial teams and dedicated solution engineering in the local language, and after the migration, support and a merchant success team in Polish too, so that the whole merchant journey is in the local language. I can't share any dates, but I know many things are happening under the hood for Poland, also regarding feature parity with other regions, and I can't give more insight than that. But I know things are happening, and if I had to place a bet in the European market right now, I'd put it on Poland.

Tomek: Cool, glad to hear it. Maurice, thank you very much once again for being here. I'm really glad we had the chance to talk today, and I believe you gave us many fruitful insights. More episodes are in our pipeline, so stay tuned for the next topics. Thank you very much.

Maurice: Thank you so much, guys. Glad to be here, and thanks for the invitation.