Allegro: marketplace guide
About this guide
This is a ChannelEngine guide on the Poznan-based marketplace Allegro. Here you can find information on how to request an Allegro account, how to configure this channel on ChannelEngine, what the specific requirements are, and more.
Table of contents
Channel-specific requirements and exceptions
Commercial information
| Founder | Arjan Bakker |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Headquarters | Poznan, Poland |
| Active markets | all EU countries, except for Cyprus and Malta* |
| Number of monthly visitors | circa 20 million |
| Website | Allegro |
| Setup cost | none |
| Commission | a percentage based on the product category |
| Other costs | a listing fee applies to some categories |
| Payment | EEA sellers: twice a month, on the 1st and 14th of each month |
| Product categories | electronics, fashion, home and garden, children, beauty, health, sports, tourism, moto, office, etc. |
| Input language (title + description) | Polish |
| Input currency | PLN |
| Content creation | yes |
| Profile on ChannelEngine | Allegro |
* Allegro excludes places that are difficult to reach for couriers, such as high mountain ranges or islands. Postal codes for those places are blocked. This means that buyers are not able to place an order for those postal codes and merchants cannot send packages there. For more information on this, refer to the How to ship abroad with Allegro article on Allegro's help center.
How to request an account
Allegro is fully focused on Poland. Therefore, most of the related communication, information, and help articles are in Polish. If you do not have a basic grasp of Polish or do not have a browser capable of auto-translating webpages (e.g.: Google Chrome), you will have a very hard time managing Allegro and sales originating from it. Furthermore, similar to eBay, Allegro is originally an auction website, so its setup and pricing model are in line with this.
To create a seller account ( firma) on Allegro, follow these steps:
1. Go to Allegro's registration page (select English version at the top right corner). Choose a company account when filling in the form.
2. Follow the activation steps as described in the email sent by Allegro.
3. Go to the My Account tab and fill in all required fields (including uploading all required documents). More information on the required documents can be found on Registration - European Economic Area.
A more detailed registration process can be found on the following websites:
- Registration for sellers from the European Economic Area
- Registration for sellers outside the European Economic Area
Associated costs
Allegro has no setup or monthly subscription costs, however, there is a commission that varies based on the product category. You can find more information on the applicable fees on Allegro's Terms & Conditions - Appendix no. 4.
Note that, for some categories, listing fees also apply – including car advertisements, live animals, antique and arts, and tickets. If you sell products in those product categories, you are also charged for each individual product offer created.
Channel features
| Supported | Not supported |
| Product content* | External fulfillment |
| Product offers (EAN-matching) | Repricing |
| Orders | Returns/refunds |
| Shipments (including carrier mapping) | |
| Cancelations |
* Product content cannot be updated via ChannelEngine. To update your product content, go to the Allegro back-end.
Settings and configuration
Setting up each channel on ChannelEngine follows the same flow, once you add the channel:
- Go through the Setup
- Create a Product selection
- Complete the Categorization
- Set up the Mappings (content, offers, and carriers)
- Configure the Pricing (rules and currency conversion)
- Finish the Activation
- Check the Listed products overview
Channel-specific requirements and exceptions
Setup
On Allegro (names are translated by Google from Polish to English)
- Add your warranty policy under Sales settings (Ustawienia sprzedazy), Warranty information (Informacje o gwarancjach).
- Add your return policy under Sales settings, Return conditions pick-up (Warunki zwrotów).
- Add at least one delivery price list (shipping costs) under Sales settings, Delivery settings (Ustawienia dostawy). The IDs of these delivery price lists can be used during the channel mapping.
- Add your terms of complaints policy. Use the name of this terms of complaints policy during the All products content mapping stage (Implied warranty name) on ChannelEngine.
On ChannelEngine
1. Go to your Allegro channel on ChannelEngine and click Setup.
2. Click Authorize. A pop-up will appear, requesting your permission to link your Allegro account to ChannelEngine. Select the Link account (Powiaz konto) button to proceed.
3. The system may prompt you to log into your Allegro seller account to accept ChannelEngine's request. Confirm it and return to ChannelEngine, a green Authorized label should be visible).
4. Enter the location of your warehouse (country code, province, city, and postal code). Note that province and postal code are only required if your warehouse/location is in Poland.
5. Your SellerId (also known as userID) can be found by logging into your Allegro account and going to the user page.
E.g.:
{"userId":"60123456","email":"support@channelengine.com","userName":"ChannelEngine"} – the SellerID is 60123456, in this case.
Product selection
Allegro does not support stock updates to zero, so it is crucial to have a rule in place under the Product selection section to exclude products with stock equal to zero.
Note that if you have more than one selection, such as 'if this then that' OR 'if that then this', you need to add the 'stock greater than zero' rule to both selections.
Categorization
Categorization is mandatory on Allegro. Allegro also offers a category tree in English, which is the one visible on ChannelEngine. You can map to English categories, and Allegro converts them into the original Polish categories on their end.
Mappings
Content
Eight attributes are required and 12 are optional, most of those are image attributes. There are also category-specific mappings which are required, depending on the categories your products belong to.
Required (all products)
- EAN - the 13-digit European article number of your product.
- Handling time - the number of days required to process the order (i.e.: the time between receiving the order and shipping it to the buyer), excluding the actual shipping time by your carrier. The values available are: immediately (same day); 24 hours (next day); 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, 5 days, 7 days, 10 days, 14 days, 21 days, 30 days, and 60 days.
- Implied warranty name - the name (which must be an exact match) of your terms of complaints policy on Allegro.
- Name - the main title/name of your product in Polish. The maximum number of characters is 50.
- Price - the price of your product in Polish złoty (PLN). There are restrictions regarding changes to the price of an existing offer:
- if the offer price is lower than PLN 50, the seller can increase it by PLN 100.
- if the offer price is higher than PLN 50, the seller can increase it by no more than 200%.
- when the price update is not possible for the currently active offer, ChannelEngine unpublishes it and publishes a new one with the updated price.
- Brand - this is a required attribute within certain categories. Select the product's brand from the fixed values provided by Allegro. If the brand is not available in the list, select Other – and make sure to also map the optional attribute Brand other accordingly.
- Manufacturer - this is a required attribute within certain categories. Select the product's manufacturer from the fixed values provided by Allegro. If the manufacturer is not available in the list, select Other – and make sure to also map the optional attribute Manufacturer other accordingly.
- Return policy name - the name (which must be an exact match) of your return policy on Allegro.
- Shipping rate name - the name (which must be an exact match) of your shipping policy on Allegro (this is also where you set the shipping time).
- Invoice setting - the product's invoice policy. Note that the value you set here is shown to customers on the product page. E.g.: no invoice, VAT, without VAT, etc.
Optional (all products)
- Apply for badge campaign - select Yes to apply for badge campaign, select No to remove it from the campaign. Note that campaigns come with additional costs.
- Badge campaigns - mandatory when Apply for badge campaign is enabled. Select the campaign from the current campaigns list. The campaign name contains an addition in brackets to mark the type of campaign. The following campaigns are available:
- Standard - adds a badge (e.g.: Hit or New) on the list of offers.
- Discount - changes the offer price. Marks new price in red and crosses out the old price.
- Sourcing - changes the price without adding a badge.
- Campaign bargain price - add a discount price in PLN. This field is required only when the Apply for badge campaign attribute is enabled and the Badge campaign attribute is set to Discount or Sourcing. Note that the discount price must be lower than the price.
- Campaign purchase limit - optional attribute that you can use to enter the maximum number of items each user can buy, when it is part of the campaign. You can only use this attribute for Discount and Sourcing campaigns. Note that the badges set up on ChannelEngine may not work if your articles already have a badge assigned by Allegro (e.g.: lowest price in the market).
- Description - the main description of your product in Polish.
- Image link, extra image link 1-9 - do not add new image links here but leave the (extra) image link fields set to the ChannelEngine product image fields. ChannelEngine automatically resize the images to the required format.
- Selling mode - determines the type of your listing on Allegro. The options available are: BUY_NOW (buy it now); AUCTION (auction); and ADVERTISEMENT (classified ad).
Offer
There are no offer mappings on Allegro. Stock is automatically included in the export, and the price and policies are included in the content export as you create your own offer.
Carrier
Carrier mapping is required on Allegro. Allegro uses a standard list of accepted carriers. If your carrier is not listed, map its name to Other.
Pricing
Allegro requires prices to be submitted in PLN. If you do not have pricing attributes in PLN, you need to set a currency conversion.
After doing this, you can go to Offer mappings and map the correct output to the price field. There you can also find two attributes per country regarding shipping times. They are called Delivery time [country name] min. and Delivery time [country name] max. Here you must provide the minimum and maximum values in days. E.g.: if your shipping time within Sweden is 1-2 days, you must set Delivery time Sweden min. to 1 and Delivery time Sweden max. to 2.
Listed products
If you have problems with products not appearing on Allegro, check the Listed products section for more information.
You can either filter based on the Channel status (e.g.: Invalid for all products that ChannelEngine has not exported, such as products with an empty EAN) or use Validation and feedback to see all known validation/feedback errors for specific products. There is no advanced feedback from Allegro, so details may be limited.
By hovering the mouse pointer on an error under the Validation and feedback tab, you can see further details on any captured error. These details include a trace-ID, which is often requested by Allegro's support when you reach out to them to solve an issue.
Additional information
Participate in Allegro campaigns (Deal Zone)
ChannelEngine lets you participate in Allegro's promotional campaigns. Allegro uses badges for campaigns to encourage customers to buy your products. Badges are textual or graphic labels used to draw buyer attention and highlight products, discounts, and/or active promotions.
Campaigns are not enabled by default. To start using campaigns, contact ChannelEngine.
To set up a campaign, follow the instructions in the Mapping section.
Mapped content for products that exist on Allegro
Although offers of existing products can be exported, Allegro requires that the chosen category and attributes match those of the product on its database. If they do not match, the export fails and you may see an error such as the following under the Validation and feedback section of your Listed products:
Existing Product related to submitted data was found. The provided category `Cereals` (261712) does not match the existing product category `Sticky notes blocks` (64557)
If you see such an error, go to Allegro's What are you selling? page and search for the product using its EAN. You can also search by product title.
Select the correct product and check its parameters. If Allegro's parameters are correct, adjust your own parameters accordingly on ChannelEngine. If Allegro's parameters are incorrect, you can request an update by selecting Report incorrect product information. Note that this requires a manual check, so it may take hours or even days for the product to be updated.
To ensure that your categories and attributes match Allegro's, ChannelEngine regularly imports and saves the product categorization. Note that you still need to complete the categorization and content mappings for products that do not exist on Allegro, as well as make sure that all required parameters are mapped.
Variations
Variations are quite complex within Allegro, therefore they are currently not supported by ChannelEngine.
Extra data items
On importing orders, the following extra data items are saved:
| Data item |
Conditional? (conditional fields only display if the channel provided a value) |
Description |
| AllegroPaymentId | No | The payment ID in the channel order. |
| Allegro chosen shipment method | No | The delivery method in the channel order. |
| Allegro smart delivery | No | Indicates whether the delivery in the channel order uses the Smart delivery method with Yes or No. |
| Discount | Yes | The discount type in the channel order. |
| Message to seller | Yes | Displays the message to seller when important information is added to the channel order. |
| AllegroBuyerId | Yes | The buyer ID in the channel order. |
| Pickup point id | Yes | The delivery pickup point ID in the channel order. |
| Pickup point name | Yes | The delivery pickup point value in the channel order. |
| Pickup point description | Yes | The delivery pickup point description in the channel order. |
| Pickup point street | Yes | The address street value of the buyer tax info in the channel order. |
| Pickup point zip code | Yes | The postal code value of the buyer tax info in the channel order. |
| Pickup point city | Yes | The address city value of the buyer tax info in the channel order. |
| Login | Yes | The login from the billing in the channel order. |
| Invoice required | Yes | Indicates with True or False whether an invoice is required. |
| SHIPPING_METHOD | No | Indicates the shipping method in the channel order. |
| DiscountAmount | Yes | The original price amount minus the old price amount in the channel order line. |
| OrignalPriceAmount | No | The original price amount in the channel order line. |
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