Where the CEE Shopify Ecosystem Came to Speak Plainly About What Is Actually Working
The Shopify Meetup Central & Eastern Europe 2026 brought together a cross-section of the regional Shopify ecosystem. Merchants, agency owners, developers, Shopify partners, marketplace operators, and platform representatives gathered at Grand Hotel Bucharest on 28 May 2026 for a day of candid, high-density conversation about where commerce in CEE is heading and what the community around it is building next.
Organised by Vevol Media and co-hosted with Ecommerce Today, the event marked the second edition of what is fast becoming the region's most active gathering for Shopify operators. The first edition sold out in 2025, and the 2026 edition followed the same pattern, drawing more than 200 attendees from across Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and the broader Central and Eastern European cluster, alongside speakers from Western Europe and India.
Rather than the keynote-and-vendor-pitch format that defines many ecommerce events, the day moved between a platform update from Shopify, operator-led case studies from regional and global merchants, a panel grounded in retention and AI, and a set of practical workshops. The result was less industry conference and more practitioner exchange. Vevol Media, a Shopify Plus Partner agency that has built the meetup into the region's second annual edition, framed the day as an opportunity for the regional community to talk honestly about what is moving and what is not.
A special thank you was extended to the partners and speakers who made the day possible: Shopify, GoKwik - our premier partner, Mollie, Easy Sales, BusinessLeague, theMarketer, Skroutz, Ecommerce Today, NeuCurrent, Aqurate, xConnector, FoxSell, Klever, Data Revolt, Consentmo, Axon by AppLovin, Love Loyalty & Rewards, Leanpay, Fulfilo, Syncap, Mejix, Limitless, Compendi, Videowise, and the wider community that turned up.
Bună ziua, București: An Update from Shopify
Shopify took the main stage with a platform update delivered by Carlotta Zorzi-Chapman, Market Expansion Lead, and Yael Weiss, Lead Solution Engineer. The session was titled "Bună ziua, București: An update from Shopify" and opened with a frame the rest of the day kept circling back to: commerce has entered a new era.
The new-era framing was specific, not abstract. Technology shifts, economic conditions, and high competition have all moved at once, and the operating reality for merchants has changed in step. The retailers Shopify is seeing succeed in 2026 are the ones who have stopped optimising for any single channel and started building toward a unified commerce posture, where the storefront, the marketplace presence, the in-store experience, and the post-purchase loop all run from the same source of truth.
"Our vision is to be the world’s most innovative unified commerce platform."
Carlotta Zorzi-Chapman, Shopify
Carlotta walked the room through where the platform is investing for that posture, with the headline themes being unified commerce, an AI layer that meets merchants where they are rather than asking them to become AI teams in-house, and a continued push into the operational depth required for mid-market and upmarket merchants in CEE. Yael followed with the technical perspective, including how the platform's infrastructure decisions in the last 18 months are translating into faster development cycles for Shopify Plus merchants and partner agencies.
The CEE-specific framing of the talk was clear. The region is no longer a follower market. It is producing some of the most operationally disciplined merchant cohorts in Europe, and the platform is investing accordingly. The maturation of the CEE Shopify partner ecosystem in the last 24 months was acknowledged directly, with the meetup itself, in its second edition, cited as part of that maturation.
The CEE Multichannel Reality: What 1,000+ Merchants Are Actually Doing
Easy Sales followed on the main stage with one of the most directly useful talks of the conference: a data-led picture of how 1,165 paying merchants across Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland are selling in 2026. Steluța Stici, Senior Account Manager at Easy Sales, set the framing up front. Not a Shopify expert. Not selling anything. Just sharing what 1,000+ CEE merchants taught the team about multichannel growth.
The numbers reframed an assumption that often goes unchallenged in Shopify-centric conversations: that the storefront is the centre of gravity. Inside the Easy Sales merchant base, marketplaces accounted for 69.9 per cent of orders in April 2026, with own websites making up the remaining 30.1 per cent. Peak volume on the platform reached 1.2M orders per month in November 2025, with 5.3M orders processed in the prior six months through 42 marketplace integrations.
"70/30. Marketplaces own volume. Own stores own the brand. If you sell only on your own store, you address 30 per cent of CEE demand. The smart play is both."
Steluța Stici, Easy Sales
The implication for Shopify operators in the region is significant. A Shopify-only strategy in CEE is, in practice, a 30 per cent strategy. Steluța walked the room through a cohort of 235 Shopify merchants on the easySales platform whose 9.4M EUR in monthly GMV broke down as 53 per cent from Shopify storefronts, 41 per cent from marketplaces such as eMAG, Allegro, and TrendyolRO, and 6 per cent from other websites. Without multichannel exposure, those same merchants would have done 5.0M EUR, a difference of 4.4M EUR per month that would have stayed off the books had the storefront been their only commercial surface.
The second pattern was operational, not commercial. Across the merchant base, automated merchants accounted for 80 per cent of all orders processed, while manually operated stores accounted for 20 per cent. The automated cohort had invoice generation, courier labels, real-time stock sync, and multi-marketplace dashboards in place. The manual cohort was copy-pasting between tabs, carrying overselling risk because of unsynced inventory, dealing with invoice errors and delays, and scaling primarily by hiring more people.
"In CEE, the winners aren't the ones with the best product. They're the ones with the best operations."
Steluța Stici, Easy Sales
For merchants, this represents a clear directional message. The 2026 ceiling is operational, not creative. For agencies, it means the conversations that move retainers are increasingly about systems integration rather than storefront features. The top integration combo observed in the Easy Sales data was eMAG paired with SmartBill, the Romanian invoicing standard, with more than 1.5M orders per year flowing through that single workflow.
Migration to Shopify: From Fragmentation to Unified Execution
David Sima, Key Account Executive at Vevol Media, a Shopify Plus Agency, took the stage with a talk grounded in agency-side migration reality across CEE. The title, "Migration to Shopify: From Fragmentation to Unified Execution", set the frame: most enterprise migrations into Shopify in the region are not coming from a clean state. They are coming from stacks held together by years of incremental fixes, multiple vendors, and integration debt that the merchant rarely sees on a single page.
The Vevol view, drawn from work with merchants across Romania, the UK, Ireland, and the broader European cluster, was that migration is no longer primarily a technical exercise. The technical part is increasingly solved. What is not solved is the coordination problem. A typical mid-market merchant heading to Shopify Plus has a dev agency on one side, a CRO partner on another, an SEO contractor, a paid ads agency, an email specialist, and a logistics integration team, often with no shared source of truth and competing recommendations across every quarter.
"The migration is no longer the bottleneck. The orchestration after the migration is the bottleneck."
David Sima, Vevol Media David walked the room through the operating playbook Vevol has developed for migration projects in CEE. The shorthand: the platform decision (Shopify Plus) is settled fast in most enterprise conversations. The conversation that follows is about who holds the strategic context once the platform is in place. That is now the defensible role.
For merchants, the practical implication is that vendor selection matters more than platform selection. For agencies, it represents a shift in defensible positioning: the value is no longer in execution capacity alone but in the ability to remain the merchant's single source of context across a multi-vendor reality. That same theme returned later in the day in the Vevol workshop, which extended it into an operating model the rest of the article comes back to.
Conversion at Scale: The GoKwik Perspective
GoKwik, the Premier Partner of Shopify Meetup CEE 2026, brought one of the day's most data-rich main-stage sessions. Abhishek Chandra, Chief Revenue Officer at GoKwik, walked the room through what high-volume conversion looks like in 2026, drawing on the platform's checkout and post-purchase data from across more than a billion transactions annually with the merchants it serves.
The headline argument was that the checkout has stopped being a UX problem and become an intelligence problem. Conversion at the modern checkout depends on signals the merchant cannot collect on their own (cross-merchant behavioural data, address quality, fraud risk in real time, prepaid versus cash-on-delivery propensity in markets where COD still dominates) and the platforms that aggregate those signals are the platforms quietly moving conversion at scale.
"The checkout is the most expensive piece of real estate a merchant owns. The merchants who treat it like one are the ones still growing in 2026."
Abhishek Chandra, GoKwik Abhishek's session connected directly with the broader theme of the day: post-acquisition is where 2026 economics are won and lost. Where Easy Sales argued that multichannel reach is the unlock, GoKwik argued that what happens after the buyer clicks add-to-cart is where the real conversion is recovered. The two sit together as the practical playbook for CEE merchants who are running into the CAC ceiling on the acquisition side and looking for the next material lever.
For agencies in the room, the GoKwik talk was a useful counter-point to a common assumption: that the checkout is finished work once the store is live. The opposite is closer to true. The merchants holding 24-month-plus retainers with their agencies are the merchants who keep iterating at the conversion layer long after launch.
The Power of Less: Scaling a Global Brand with Six People
Mollie used the main stage to tell a different kind of growth story. Grace Radley, Sr. Country Partnerships Manager at Mollie, alongside Zara Ali, Pawel Odziemczyk, and Sebastián Michaud, delivered a talk titled "The Power of Less: Scaling a Global Brand with 6 People", drawing on a Mollie merchant case study run jointly with Nudient and Shopify.
The argument was direct. In a market where customer acquisition costs continue to climb across CEE and Western Europe, leverage no longer comes from team size. It comes from the choices teams make about what to centralise, what to automate, and what to outsource. The most expensive mistake remains the same one most growing brands make: hiring before tooling, which locks in cost structure faster than revenue can catch up.
For agencies in the room, the implication was a quiet one. The merchants worth keeping for long retainers are not the ones running on twenty-person growth teams. They are the ones who got operating leverage right early and are reinvesting it into product, story, and category expansion. Grace's session argued, indirectly but clearly, that the payment layer is part of that operating discipline rather than a back-office afterthought.
The Mathematical Reality of CAC: Why Email Automation Came Back
Paul Apostu, CGO of Ecommerce Today Agency & Apps, opened the day's AI track with a talk titled "AI-Powered Email Automation: Smarter Journeys. Higher Profits." The framing was a direct response to the dominant paid-ads playbook of the last decade.
"CAC is rising. Ads = renting attention."
Paul Apostu, Ecommerce Today
Paul walked through a CAC evolution chart that mapped the last decade of ecommerce acquisition economics. The 2016 to 2019 period was characterised as the Golden Age, with low entry barriers and high return on ad spend. The 2020 to 2022 period covered the pandemic-driven surge in online commerce followed by the privacy shock of iOS 14.5 and the broader tracking restrictions that reset attribution across the industry. The 2023 to 2026 period was framed as Optimisation and AI, the era in which CAC stabilised at materially higher levels, AI rebalanced the marketing mix, and retention became the structural focus. His argument was that email and SMS, long treated as channels brands "should be doing better at", have re-emerged as the primary growth lever in CEE. The reason is structural. Owned channels are the only channels where the merchant is not paying for attention every time the customer is reached, which means the unit economics improve with retention rather than degrade with each acquisition. AI changes this further by making segmentation, timing, and copy decisions at a granularity that small in-house marketing teams could never reach manually.
Cross-border Becomes Borderless: The Skroutz View
Thanasis Psychogios, Senior International Business Development Manager at Skroutz, brought the marketplace perspective to the main stage with a session titled "Shopping Simplified: From Cross-border to Borderless." Skroutz, Greece's largest comparison engine and marketplace, has been quietly expanding its CEE presence and offered the room a candid view of how cross-border commerce is reorganising itself in 2026.
The headline argument was that the cross-border friction that defined European ecommerce until recently is collapsing. Logistics networks have consolidated, currency handling has been abstracted by payment platforms, and the marketplace layer is increasingly comfortable acting as a fulfilment and customer-service backbone for merchants that want to sell into adjacent markets without setting up local entities.
For Shopify merchants in CEE, the practical opening is that selling into Greece, Italy, or Cyprus is now closer to selling into the home market than the cross-border narrative of three years ago suggested. The merchants who have already wired Shopify into a marketplace operator have a structural head-start when the conversation moves to new geographies.
Retention as the Structural Focus of 2026
The retention thread continued in the NeuCurrent talk on omnichannel retail and behaviour-led customer retention. The argument: most omnichannel programmes in CEE today are operational rather than behavioural. They unify inventory and fulfilment, but they do not yet unify what the brand actually knows about the customer's behaviour across surfaces.
The shift, in NeuCurrent's framing, is from omnichannel as a logistics problem to omnichannel as a behavioural intelligence problem. Brands that can observe what their customers do, not just what they buy, across physical and digital touchpoints are the brands with material retention upside in the next 18 months. The tooling is now within reach for mid-market CEE merchants in a way it was not in 2024.
"Loyalty has stopped being a programme. It is a behavioural state the brand has to design for."
NeuCurrent, Shopify Meetup CEE 2026
Decoding the Cart: BusinessLeague on CEE Consumer Patterns
BusinessLeague brought the affiliate and cart-data perspective to the main stage with Ana Oprita, Deputy CEO at BusinessLeague, presenting “Decoding the Cart: Consumer Patterns from 50K eshop-Affiliate Partnerships.” The data set was unusual: cart-level behavioural patterns across 50,000 affiliate touchpoints serving CEE shoppers, with the granularity that affiliate-side data offers and merchant-side analytics rarely match.
Ana walked the room through where CEE consumer behaviour diverges from Western European norms and where it converges. The headline insight was that cart abandonment in CEE is less about price sensitivity at checkout (as it tends to be framed in pan-European reports) and more about a trust and clarity gap earlier in the journey. The shoppers most likely to convert were those who entered the funnel with affiliate-side context (reviews, comparisons, social proof) already established. For Shopify merchants, the implication was that the affiliate layer is not a pure acquisition channel any more. It is a trust-construction layer, and the data trail it leaves is a leading indicator of conversion that the merchant’s own analytics will not surface.
The Power of Data in Communication: theMarketer
theMarketer used the main stage to make the case for owned channels at a level of operational depth the typical email-marketing talk does not reach. Rares Banescu, Owner & Founder at theMarketer, presented “The Power of Data in eCommerce & Communication,” walking through what high-performance email, SMS, and push notification programmes look like for CEE merchants in 2026.
The thesis was that the brands still winning on customer lifetime value are the ones that treat their data layer, their flows, and their channel mix as one continuous operating decision rather than three. Rares argued that the gap between an underperforming retention programme and a strong one in CEE is rarely about creative or even segmentation. It is about whether the merchant’s customer data is wired into the right system in the first place. For agencies in the room, the practical takeaway was the same one running through the day: the retainers that hold over time are the ones that own the data layer, not just the campaign layer.
Bundles as Brand Expression: FoxSell on Luxury Commerce
FoxSell brought the bundling perspective with one of the day’s most concrete merchant stories. Prakhar Shrivastava, Co-founder at FoxSell Bundles, presented “How a Luxury Bundle Builder Became a Premium Commerce Experience with FoxSell”, drawing on a Shopify merchant case study in the premium category.
The argument was that bundling has quietly moved from a utility (a way to lift average order value) into an experience layer that high-end Shopify brands are using to differentiate. Prakhar walked the room through how a luxury merchant restructured product presentation, gift logic, and post-purchase upsells around a bundle-first storefront, and where the unit-economics impact landed. For merchants in the room, the talk offered a usable mental model: bundles are not a discount mechanic. They are a way to compose value at the storefront level, and the merchants using them well are the ones treating them as part of brand expression rather than as a margin lever.
How AI Is Transforming Ecommerce and Retention: The Main Panel
The afternoon's most-attended session was the panel discussion titled "How AI Is Transforming Ecommerce & Retention in 2026", hosted by Dan Nistor, Co-Founder & CEO at Vevol Media. Dan brought five panellists from across the CEE and broader European ecommerce world: Andrei Pandurita ( CEO at Dispotrading.ro), Gabriel Bonciu (Business Dev. Director at BusinessLeague), Carlotta Zorzi-Chapman (Market Expansion Lead at Shopify), Abhishek Chandra (Chief Revenue Officer at GoKwik), Bogdan Dogaru (Co-Founder & CTO at Vevol Media), and Ștefan Chiriacescu (Co-Founder & CEO at Ecommerce Today).
The honest framing of the panel was that AI in commerce has moved past the curiosity phase and is now operating inside the actual workflows that decide merchant outcomes. The questions on stage were no longer "should we be using AI" but "where does AI judgment hold up under real customer data and where does it still fail."
Several practical positions emerged. The Shopify perspective, articulated by Carlotta, was that the platform's role is to make AI usable for merchants without requiring an AI team in-house. The agency perspective, articulated by Bogdan and Ștefan, was that the biggest unlock in 2026 has been treating AI as the engine that processes a merchant's actual data into prioritised, actionable plans, rather than as a generic content tool. The marketplace and payments perspective, from Abhishek at GoKwik, was that conversion and retention are increasingly inseparable, and that AI's role at checkout and post-purchase is where the next round of incremental revenue is being unlocked. Gabriel grounded the conversation in CEE consumer data, illustrating where regional buying patterns diverge from Western European norms and what AI personalisation has to learn from those divergences.
The shared position across the panel was that retention has become the dominant strategic conversation for 2026. Acquisition costs have plateaued at structurally high levels. The only material lever left is what happens after the first order.
The Orchestrator Model: Vevol Media's Workshop
The most operationally detailed session of the day came from the Vevol Media workshop, hosted by Bogdan Dogaru, Co-Founder & CTO at Vevol Media. The title, "AI-Driven Shopify Strategy and Delivery: Orchestrating Growth", set the frame for a session that walked the room through the operating model Vevol uses with merchant clients.
The starting point was a problem most merchants in the room recognised. The typical Shopify merchant in 2026 does not have one agency. They have five. A development agency, a CRO team, an SEO partner, a paid ads agency, and an email specialist, each working in their own silo, each reporting on different metrics, none of them talking to each other. The result is conflicting priorities, duplicated effort, and a merchant who cannot tell which agency actually moved the needle.
Bogdan walked the room through what he called the Orchestrator model: a posture in which the agency stops being just another execution partner and becomes the coordination layer between the merchant and all the other parties involved in growth. The defensibility of that role, in the Vevol framing, comes from a shared context the orchestrator maintains across data, audits, strategy history, and prioritisation. Decisions across vendors flow from the same context, which prevents the silo problem from re-forming as the engagement scales.
"AI is not a shortcut for generating generic content. It is the engine that processes real client data into prioritised, developer-ready plans."
Bogdan Dogaru, Vevol Media
The live demo took the room from raw analytics to a full monthly sprint on a real client, using the actual tooling Vevol runs, with developer-ready tasks extracted from audits and pushed into Asana as an approved plan. The most useful part of the session, in line with the broader honesty of the day, was the part where the system breaks. Bogdan walked through where AI judgment fails, where human expertise remains non-negotiable, and what the team is still building.
The third pillar of the workshop was attribution. A three-tier framework separated what an agency fully owns (Core Web Vitals, tracking accuracy, code health), what it co-influences with other parties, and what it only reports on for context. The argument was that this distinction is the operational reason agencies hold clients for 24 months or more.
For agencies in the room, the Vevol session offered an unusually direct answer to the question of how the agency model evolves in a multi-vendor, AI-heavy reality. For merchants, it offered a way to read the agency relationships they already have, with a clearer view of which one is actually holding the strategic context.
Workshops Across the Day
Alongside the main stage, a parallel workshop track ran through the day in the Opera room, hosted by Aqurate, theMarketer, Vevol Media, xConnector, GoKwik, and Ecommerce Today. The sessions covered conversion at checkout, AI-driven personalisation, email and SMS lifecycle architecture, fulfilment and returns operations, and the operating decisions that distinguish well-run Shopify stores from those that drift. Each workshop was built for practical takeaways rather than overview, and the rooms stayed full throughout the day.
What the Ecosystem Is Building Next
Several patterns ran across the day and are worth carrying into the rest of 2026.
The first is that the Shopify operator conversation in CEE has fully moved past the platform-debate phase. The decision to be on Shopify, for mid-market merchants in the region, is no longer the question on the table. The question is what is built on top of it, who coordinates it, and how the agency model evolves to keep pace. The Shopify update from Carlotta and Yael landed on the same point from the platform side: this is a new era of commerce, and CEE is one of the markets where the next phase is being defined.
The second is that AI is no longer a curiosity layered over commerce. It is now embedded in the actual operating decisions agencies and merchants make about content, segmentation, prioritisation, and code. The talks and workshops that drew the most attention were those that demonstrated AI inside real workflows on real data, not those that demonstrated AI in the abstract.
The third is that retention has become the strategic centre of gravity for 2026. The day's strongest data points (Easy Sales on operational discipline, Ecommerce Today on the CAC plateau, GoKwik on checkout intelligence, NeuCurrent on behavioural retention, Mollie on operating leverage, the panel on what AI can and cannot do for post-purchase) all converged on the same point. The next phase of growth in CEE commerce will be won and lost after the first order.
The fourth is that the regional community is consolidating fast. The room was visibly more cross-border than the 2025 edition, with active practitioners from Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Greece, and the Balkans alongside the Romanian core. The combination of the marketplace footprint Easy Sales described, the cross-border collapse Skroutz described, and the maturation of the Romanian Shopify partner ecosystem makes CEE a single commercial geography in a way it has not been before.
The fifth is that the Vevol Media position has shifted. The agency went into Shopify Meetup CEE 2026 known as the host of the region's largest annual Shopify event. The day made it clear that the role Vevol is actually building toward is bigger. Between the migration playbook David presented, the orchestrator model Bogdan walked the room through, and Dan's hosting of the AI and retention panel, the company is positioning itself as the coordination layer the CEE Shopify ecosystem is converging toward.
Shopify Meetup Central & Eastern Europe will be back. The third edition is already on the horizon for 2027, and the conversations the 2026 edition started, on operations, on AI, on retention, on coordination, will keep moving in public until then.
Shopify Meetup Central & Eastern Europe 2026 was organised by Vevol Media and Ecommerce Today, with GoKwik as Premier Partner. The event took place on 28 May 2026 at Grand Hotel Bucharest.