MODIVO and Packeta on the Cross-Border Trend: Why 1,600 km to Romania Is an Inventory Problem, Not a Transport One

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało's guests are Marek Harag of MODIVO and Piotr Pydzik of Packeta, who share their experience expanding cross-border e-commerce across more than 20 Central and Eastern European markets. They discuss why 1,600 km to Romania is an inventory problem, not a transport one, and how to handle the sheer variety of required delivery formats.

SOUTH-EASTERN MARKETS AS AN OPPORTUNITY, NOT "1990S POLAND"

Romania and Bulgaria are sometimes mistakenly seen as early-stage markets — in reality they're already "advanced 2000s," with real potential, not a wild west. Cross-border is projected to grow to a value of 3 trillion euros by 2028, and 70% of Polish internet users already buy online from abroad today (in Hungary or Romania, as much as 90%). The popularity of Polish stores in the region comes from the fragmentation of smaller markets — residents of smaller countries look for goods abroad more often, because local availability is limited, and Polish brands are sometimes recognized without shoppers even realizing they're from Poland.

EVERY MARKET HAS DIFFERENT DELIVERY PREFERENCES

In Poland and the Baltic states, parcel-locker pickup reaches 80% of volume; in Western Europe, pickup points are only around 20%, and in Southern Europe the Out-of-Home market is still only slowly developing. A Polish customer accepts a maximum of two days' wait for delivery — at a distance of 1,600 km from Poland to a warehouse in Romania, meeting that standard with direct transport is practically impossible, hence MODIVO's decision to open its own logistics center in Bucharest, serving Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, and the Romanian market itself as local from there.

INTEGRATOR OR A DIRECT LOCAL PARTNER

A key dilemma at the start of expansion: negotiate directly with the local delivery leader (e.g. Fan Courier in Romania, Croatian Post in the Balkans) or use an integrator that connects multiple local providers under a single technical integration. Bargaining power counts per market, not per the company's total volume — a company shipping tens of thousands of parcels to Germany, a few thousand to France, and a few hundred to Spain is seen by each local provider separately, not as a large regional player. An integrator that aggregates the volume of many stores at once can be the answer, lowering the entry threshold and giving access to local delivery "heroes" without individual negotiations in every market separately.

THERE'S NO SINGLE UNIVERSAL STRATEGY

The same company can use different models in different markets: a direct contract with a local courier where volume already justifies negotiation, an integrator where it's still growing, and its own middle-mile infrastructure where scale justifies the investment. MODIVO deliberately mixes these models depending on how mature its sales are in a given market.

COST PER ORDER: WHY CROSS-BORDER DOESN'T ALWAYS MEAN LOWER MARGIN

Transport, especially the last mile, makes up 60-70% of cross-border logistics costs. The real break-even point: at low volume in a given market, an integrator (splitting middle-mile costs across many clients) comes out cheaper than a direct courier contract; at high volume, your own regional distribution (like the Bucharest warehouse) delivers a lower unit cost and shorter delivery time than shipping directly from Poland. A counterintuitive conclusion: receptive markets sometimes allow a higher product margin that more than compensates for the extra delivery cost — cross-border can end up more profitable than local sales, if you calculate it properly per sales channel (activity-based costing), not per product category.

THE TRAP OF SCATTERED REGIONAL WAREHOUSES

A company based in Kraków, present in 30 markets, with a central warehouse in Poland and three regional warehouses in Europe, ran into an unexpected problem: moving from a single, centralized inventory management model to managing it across multiple locations at once multiplied the number of product-location combinations enough that managing it in a spreadsheet stopped being enough. A decision to distribute regional inventory requires a much more advanced planning system than a simple single-central-warehouse model.

START WITH ONE MARKET

80% of Packeta clients who launch in one foreign market start looking for the next one within a few months — because adding another country within the same technical integration is much simpler than starting from zero. Both speakers' recommendation: you don't have to "run" right away — it's enough to first "learn to walk" in one market, checking local customers' real delivery preferences, before scaling further.