The marketplace was ready. Retail was a different business.
Adding a grocery shop to an app is simple. Making hundreds of different shops work well on the same marketplace is not.
Wolt had built a strong food delivery experience. Bringing grocery, convenience, pharmacy, pet supplies and other retail categories onto the platform meant extending that promise to a very different set of partners.
Restaurants had comparatively familiar menus, workflows and operating economics. Retail stores varied enormously: a supermarket chain has procurement and integration requirements that a corner shop doesn't; a pharmacy has different regulatory and catalogue needs from a pet store.
Our challenge was to build a new business line, not simply sign a list of merchants. We needed partners customers would actually order from, and an operation that could bring each store live, maintain a usable catalogue and help the partner grow.
Build the teams around the partner lifecycle
I led the development of the Hungarian retail business and built an organisation of around 30 people across sales and acquisition, partner onboarding, technical support and partner development.
We didn't organise the work as one undifferentiated account manager job. We defined responsibilities for finding and negotiating with partners, getting locations live, handling technical issues and developing revenue after launch.
Category and territory prioritisation, prospecting, national-chain negotiations and a visible pipeline.
Product data, photos, catalogue structure, technical integration, staff training and launch checks.
Fix the messy integration and operational issues that surface when a store goes live.
Account routines, promotions, conversion, availability, rejection rates and partner performance.
The 2021 team blueprints included concrete handover points: for instance, newly onboarded stores remained with onboarding support for the first 30 days before ongoing development. That kind of ownership detail was essential when the portfolio grew.
Different partners. One repeatable operating model.
The portfolio came to include more than 1,000 individual physical retail locations, not just 1,000 company names or logos.
We worked with large chains such as SPAR and Tesco, convenience retailers like Manna ABC, pharmacy partners including BENU and Unipatika, and specialist stores such as Fressnapf. The mix also included many small independent neighbourhood businesses.
Those different partners demanded different sales motions and operational support. A national chain could justify a bespoke integration conversation; a small independent store needed a simple, reliable path to launch. The challenge was to accommodate both without building a separate organisation for every category.
We developed common commercial and operational foundations: segmented pipeline, onboarding steps, catalogue and image checks, launch readiness, technical handoff and account-development routines. They were standards that teams could adapt, rather than a rigid checklist applied regardless of context.
A signed deal was not the finish line
Acquisition targets alone were a dangerous way to judge the business. A store could be signed and live but contribute very little customer value if the assortment was thin, the catalogue was poor or orders were frequently rejected.
We therefore tracked the journey from sales through to productive activity: signed and live locations, time to launch, catalogue and image coverage, average basket value, conversion, order rejection rates, store availability and gross order value (GOV).
One principle guided the account approach: a good partner relationship should generate sustainable business for both sides. The commercial team needed to understand the partner’s economics as well as ours.
How do you turn a long list of signed stores into a portfolio of locations that customers want to order from — and that partners are motivated to keep operating?
A new business that could run at scale
The retail business grew into a portfolio of over 1,000 physical partner locations supported by a roughly 30-person commercial and operations organisation.
The Hungarian retail business reached approximately EUR 7 million in annual gross order value (GOV) around 2021.
Beyond the portfolio size, the lasting achievement was an operating setup that could handle different kinds of retailers without depending entirely on individual relationships and improvised workarounds.
Zero-to-one business building with real commercial ownership: choosing partners, negotiating, building teams, designing the process from sale to launch, and making a new business line operationally sustainable.