About the company
Desportivo has been around since 2011. The company started in Poland selling sportswear, footwear and sports accessories, and today sells across Europe. Its range includes brands everyone knows: adidas, Nike, Puma, Under Armour, 4F, Asics, Champion, Kappa and many more.
“From the start, we’ve believed that good branded clothing should be within everyone’s reach. That’s why we focus on genuine products, fair prices and efficient service.”
Desportivo runs its own online stores in 10 countries, each in the local language and currency: in Poland, Germany, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Belgium and the Netherlands. On top of that, it sells on the largest marketplaces – Allegro, Amazon in several countries, the Decathlon marketplace, bol.com, Otto, eMAG and many more. It also handles orders for clubs, schools and institutions.
- 10 countries
- Own stores
-
Allegro
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Amazon
- Decathlon
- bol.com
- Otto
- eMAG
- Clubs and schools
In 2024, Desportivo ranked third place in the sportswear category in the PCCA ranking. Allegro is still one of the company's two most important channels, so how Desportivo advertises there matters enormously for the results of the whole business.
The challenge: high ROAS, thin margins
With this many channels, the hardest part isn't selling – it's making money on what you sell. Every unit pays commission, shipping, sometimes a return along the way – plus advertising. On Allegro, advertising is one of the biggest costs.
For a long time, like most of the market, the company judged it through the lens of ROAS.
ROAS looked good, the reports were green, and at the end of the month it turned out that some of those sales left us nothing – or we were even losing money.
The true scale of the problem became clear only when the company started calculating each channel's margin every day. The gap between what the ad reports showed and what actually stayed in the company turned out to be large.
- marketplace commissions, shipping and returns weighing on every unit,
- advertising as one of the biggest costs on Allegro,
- a ROAS that looked good even though some sales weren't profitable,
- no daily view of margin in each channel.
A smaller team, the same channels
Costs rose every month: marketplace commissions, shipping, advertising. Margins kept getting thinner. It was a difficult time for the company – month after month forced them to shrink the team.
“Every such decision hurt, because behind it were people we’d built the company with. The workload didn’t shrink, though. The same channels had to be run by an ever smaller group.”
Closing channels was out of the question – each had been built with great effort and each brings in customers. There was only one way out: if all channels are to run with a smaller team, automation has to do part of the work.
Allegro advertising was the natural place to start. It needs daily attention, can't be run well by hand with such a large catalog, and at the same time directly decides whether sales are profitable at all. So Desportivo looked for a tool that would take over campaign monitoring and keep an eye on what matters most – profit, not just revenue.
Why Desportivo chose Senvio
The first contact with Senvio happened by chance: the person responsible for advertising at Desportivo came across a Senvio ad on Facebook.
I laughed, because the day before I'd been saying to myself: when will someone finally build an AI tool for running ads? And even if they do, no one will think of basing it on purchase prices, i.e. on how much we really earn on each product. And there you go – the very next day, it's right in front of me.
The decision came quickly. After setting up an account and running the first tests, the team was convinced of Senvio's potential. The key was that Senvio runs campaigns based on purchase prices and margin, not just revenue.
“I felt this might be exactly what we’d been looking for.”
Onboarding and support
The person responsible for advertising at Desportivo prefers to learn tools hands-on rather than from manuals. With Senvio this went smoothly, because the system is intuitive and, as they put it, “there is nothing overcomplicated about it.”
The team discovered most features on its own and sent questions to the Senvio team in batches. The company admits that chat support was sometimes difficult at first, but it has improved significantly in recent weeks.
The team responds quickly and to the point. That’s how it should be – when you hand over management of your ad budget, you need to know there’s someone on the other side who responds.
Senvio in the company's daily work
The company tested several ways of working with Senvio:
Full automation
Senvio picks the products and builds campaigns around them on its own. The team only looks at the results.
Partial automation
The team picks offers and builds campaigns themselves, and Senvio runs and optimizes them.
Running ads through the Senvio agency account
The Senvio team runs the ads, much like an agency. Desportivo still uses this model today.
“Results varied, but one thing I can say with a clear conscience: if you don’t have time but want to get started with Allegro ads quickly and sensibly, leave offer selection to Senvio. You get peace of mind and just watch the results.”
Campaigns under control, even on weekends
At Desportivo, Allegro ads were always run by one person. Anyone managing campaigns alone at scale knows the work never stops.
Just leave your campaigns on Friday and don’t check them over the weekend, and on Monday you’ll open the results and hold your head in your hands.
In fashion and sportswear this is especially noticeable. Sales depend on many factors, including the weather, and a single cooler or unusually hot weekend can change results significantly.
With Senvio, analyzing ad performance now takes about 20 minutes, compared with one or two hours a day before. Much of the credit goes to Senvio’s extensive analytics system, which shows what matters right away.
The time saved goes to things there was never enough time for before: refining offers, analyzing the product range and other activities.
From revenue to real profit
“We used to be happy that we were leaders in our categories. But what was the point, when the numbers came back from the accountant and the margin was scraping the bottom.”
The turning point came in August, when Senvio began optimizing campaigns for margin rather than ROAS. For Desportivo, this wasn't just a new setting in a tool, but a change in mindset.
You can have an excellent ROAS and still sell at a loss when ads push low-margin or frequently returned products. Once campaigns started taking real profit into account, evaluating advertising within the company became much simpler.
Driving turnover is easy. The real skill is driving turnover and still earning a decent profit on it.
Today the key question at Desportivo is not how much revenue an ad generated, but how much the company earned from it. This translates into better financial results with lower inventory turnover.
Before Senvio
- Campaign goal ROAS and revenue
- Ad analysis 1–2 hours a day
- Weekends Manual campaign monitoring
- Budget Including break-even sales
- Warehouse More stock for the same profit
With Senvio
- Campaign goal Margin and real profit
- Ad analysis About 20 minutes
- Weekends Senvio works 24/7
- Budget Where the company makes money
- Warehouse Better results with lower turnover
Results
The company analyzes results daily. Since August, with campaigns optimized for margin:
- margin on the main Allegro account, calculated as a percentage of sales, is higher by roughly a fifth than in the months before the change,
- in PLN the company earns on Allegro tens of percent more on average,
- September was the best month of the year on this channel,
- budget goes where the company really makes money – without subsidising sales that only looked good in reports,
- ad analysis takes about 20 minutes instead of 1–2 hours a day.
“Of course many things affect margin, but advertising is one of our biggest costs, so the fact that it started working for profit was felt immediately.”
Next step: Google Ads
Desportivo values Senvio's continuous development and the fact that customer feedback genuinely shapes the direction of the product.
“There’s someone on the other side who listens, and over time the tool gets better for us too. You can tell the team knows where it’s going and what it wants to achieve.”
The next step is tests of Google Ads campaigns run by Senvio. The company wants to test Senvio's effectiveness in this channel as well.
Desportivo's recommendations
For sellers who lack time for ads: if you want to get started with Allegro ads quickly and sensibly, leave offer selection to Senvio. You get peace of mind and just watch the results.
To other e-commerce businesses: don’t judge advertising by ROAS alone. Calculate the margin of each channel day by day – only then can you see which sales really make money.
Who Desportivo recommends Senvio to
“Definitely people who are just starting out on Allegro. But companies with a large product portfolio can easily use them too.”
- If you run a one-person business and don’t want to spend half the day analyzing campaigns or figuring out which products to put in them – create a Senvio account.
- If you’re a mid-sized or large player and don’t want your team spending hours on analysis and strategy – try Senvio and see how much time is left for other marketing work.
There’s no perfect tool and there never will be. Each has its pros and cons. What matters is that at the end of the day, in the results summary, the AI agent says the channel is profitable.
