Online mall Vendi.pl launches

By : Roseanne Gerin

   Vendi.pl (http://www.vendi.pl), an online shopping mall, was launched last Wednesday, almost a year after its inception by media giant Agora (http://www.agora.pl), and systems integrator ComputerLand (http://www.computerland.pl).

   “Fundamentally, we believe in e-commerce,” said Bogdan Wiœniewski, president of Centrum Handlu Internetowego (CHI), the firm that operates Vendi.pl. “And based on (the fact) that the majority of Agora’s advertising customers are mainly small businesses, (we wanted) to give them an opportunity to offer their goods on the Internet.”

   Agora and ComputerLand each own a 50% stake in CHI. They invested a total of zł. 9 million ($2.1 million) in the project, and expect to break even in three years. Vendi.pl plans to generate revenue by renting online space to merchants for about zł. 400 per month, and by charging an average 3% sales commission. Although Vendi.pl’s operational expenses are about zł. 400,000 per month, Wiœniewski declined to specify the site’s forecast revenue.

   Vendi.pl was supposed to launch earlier this year, but CHI needed more time to adapt e-commerce software created for the American online market to the slower, and smaller, Polish e-commerce market, Wiœniewski said.

   CHI wants to target Poland’s 250,000-300,000 small and medium-sized businesses with Internet access to convince them to sell their products via Vendi.pl, Wiœniewski said. CHI is conducting seminars around Poland to recruit merchants for the online service. So far, 60 shops sell their products via Vendi.pl.

   Vendi.pl eventually expects to have more than 500 online retailers, and hopes to be one of the three largest Internet shopping malls, Wiœniewki said. He said they’ll compete directly with similar e-commerce services offered by Poland’s two largest portals, Onet and Wirtualna Polska.

   Vendi.pl’s launch arrives as e-commerce has yet to make significant headway in Poland. According to a September report issued by I-Metria, an Internet market research company, 150 new online business-to-consumer e-commerce sites were launched in Poland over the previous nine months, while more than 100 closed.

   Nevertheless, Wiœniewski said that Vendi.pl would distinguish itself from other sites by offering quality products to Internet surfers.