How has business evolved for sun.store this year?
This year we put our energy into something quite simple: making sun.store more valuable, and much more convenient, for the people who use it. For buyers, and just as much for the merchants who supply them. The first change is Delivery by sun.store. Shipping is now priced automatically, parcels, pallets and full containers, across the European Union. Buyers no longer have to wait for a freight quote from each seller. They can close a deal from almost anywhere in Europe, for almost any size of shipment, straight away.
The second is sun.finance. With Allianz Trade, one of the world’s largest trade-credit insurers, and Alior Bank, one of the largest banks in Poland, we have opened trade-credit limits for almost a thousand of our users. They can take the goods when a job needs them, and pay 30 days after delivery. For merchants, we launched a new Merchant Center in September. It is much easier to see how each offer is performing, and to keep it up to date. Soon we will add tools that make it easier still to win new business, and to bring products that are completely new onto the platform.
What kind of impact has that had on your business?
The wider market has had a difficult year. Residential and commercial installations are not moving the way they did over the last few years. Against that, what we see in our own business is healthy growth. Orders are up by about 20% year on year: around 8,000 so far, compared with about 6,700 a year ago. Almost 2,000 buyers have used sun.store this year. What that adds up to is that we can now be a real backbone for companies trading photovoltaic components. Delivery, financing, and access to more than €1 billion of goods across Europe, in one place. A distributor, an installer or an online seller can grow their business with us, without first having to stock up.
CEO of sun.store: “We provide real-time availability”
What changes are you seeing in the market?
The market for residential and small commercial and industrial installations has slowed, almost everywhere in Europe. It has also become much more fragmented. Many international distributors have closed their operations abroad and cut their stock sharply, and several large national installers have left the business. The companies still active tend to be smaller, more agile distributors, carrying less inventory, and local installers. That is exactly who sun.store is for. Those businesses can reach more than €1 billion of goods, with delivery and financing already attached, and serve their own customers without holding all of that stock themselves. We are also seeing more batteries – in installations, and in trading on sun.store. So we are working with manufacturers and distributors to widen the choice our buyers have. And since last year we have published the Battery Index, so buyers can follow how prices are moving without having to piece that together on their own.
How does this affect your portfolio?
We want to be the place a buyer comes for the components they actually need on a job, not only modules, inverters and batteries. From October we are opening a broader range, and a better experience for buying and selling, in solar cable. Gradually we want that to cover the other cables used in solar and storage, and in construction more widely. We hope it is the first step into construction and home improvement, where we believe we can be genuinely useful to buyers across Europe. We are also piloting a closer cooperation with manufacturers whose brands are well known, but whose offer on the platform has not yet matched that standing. The idea is that they sell directly to installers, especially in countries where they do not yet feel well enough represented. GCL and EnerShare are two of the names in that work.
How strong is demand for your financing offering?
We only finished the pilot over the summer, and already around 20 percent of sales on the platform are financed with sun.finance. What pleases us most is what those buyers do next. They come back more often. sun.store starts to work as an extension of their own stock: they can send the components they need straight to a client, or straight to the installation site. There is still plenty of room in the facility we have with Alior. Over the next twelve months we hope to see that share grow several times over.
What is your outlook, and what milestones have you set for 2027?
The milestone we care about most is whether our buyers, and our sellers, are actually happy with the experience. We follow that on several levels: Net Promoter Score (NPS) on the buyer side and on the seller side, and a satisfaction check on every transaction. If we look after that properly, more people in the industry will start using sun.store as a normal part of how they work, a natural extension of the stock they already hold. That is where we see ourselves in 2027: as the backbone that solar, storage and construction businesses across Europe can rely on.
Interview by Hans-Christoph Neidlein
